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Class. 



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Book 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Shadows 
Lifted 



on 



Sunshine Restored 

in the Horizon of Human Lives 



A Treatise on the 



MORPHINE, OPIUM, COCAINE, 
CHORAL and HASHISH HABITS. 

K 



Cop3'r/o-7ite<7. 



.1 V' 



Shadows Lifted 



OR 



Sunshine Restored in the Horizon of 
Human Lives 



A Treatise on the Morphine, Opium, Cocaine, 
Chloral and Hashish Habits 



BY I 

GEORGE WHEELOCK'GROVER, M. D. 

Graduate of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Nezv York; 

Formerly Physician to the Brooklyn City Hospital; Attending 

Physician to the New York Dispensary; Member of 

the Massachusetts Medical Society, etc. 




CHICAGO: / / ^ 6 t, ■%, 



Stromberg, Allen & Co., Printers, 
1894. 



I 



K OS 



THE OPIUM EATERS MOTTO. 

All hope abandon, ye who enter here." — Dante. 



• • 



THE OPIUM EATERS NEW YEAR'S GREETING. 

"Non sum qualis eram (I am not what I was)." — 

Tom Marshall. 



THE REASON WHY. 



"And passed by on the other side." — Parable of Good Samar- 
itan. 

"It is my only suit, that you weed your better judgments of 
all opinion that grows rank in them." — As You Like It. 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE KEASON WHY. 

The interrogation points in men's souls steadily grow 
larger as the world grows older. The question why is 
written on the firmament of human life, sometimes in let- 
ters that blaze like the sunlight, often in those that seem 
bound about with bands of darkness. The why that sur- 
rounds shipwrecked lives has always rested upon two 
bases, one the corner stone of mystery, the other of ap- 
prehension. Theologians for centuries, philosophers for 
generations, have tried to throw the candle of illumination 
to the heart of human ruin, but have illumined only its 
outer edge. The heart of human misery has steadily and 
sadly throbbed on, in spite of the anodyne of the philos- 
opher or the sedative of the theologian. Why are men 
born with their sky of life in a total eclipse that never 
ceases, with the echo of curses of by-gone generations 
ceaselessly sounding in their ears % The drunkard asks 
this question in the midst of his wildest debauch, the opium 
eater whispers its horrible suggestiveness as the bell of 
hopelessness sounds in his ears for ever the story of his 
despairing life. Go back to the beginning of authentic 
history, and in the drunkenness of Noah and the backward 
look of the wife of Lot we meet the same desire that leads 
the man of to-day to order his morning cocktail to try to 
lying the lurid gleams of dissipation into the center of his 



6 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

life. Could the epitaphs of all the countless millions of 
lives that slumber in the bosom of this planet of ours, as 
well as those that walk to-day upon its surface, tell their 
story of woe and final hopelessness, we should come face 
to face in every generation with the ever present desire of 
men to put into life what the kindly and ever generous 
hand of nature never thought of placing there. We look 
upon the drunkard, and w r e wonder why he chooses to 
drink. We behold the man of brains and parts putting 
into his mouth "the enemy that doth steal away his 
brains," and we wonder why he does it. We look into 
the eyes of the man in whose life the star of hope hath set, 
and, though he goes through the world almost unrecog- 
nized by bis fellow-men, yet can we stand with him soul 
to soul. Still the old question again: Why hath he chosen, 
why does he choose, to dress his soul in blackness ? 

In every land, in all nations, civilized or uncivilized, 
of differing races, habits, modes of life, we find this one 
element in common: The stimulant, the narcotic, the ano- 
dyne is ever at their door. . Modern science, which ques- 
tions everything, which accepts no answer that is not but- 
tressed by proof, raises with renewed emphasis the old 
question, why, with the aid of the alcohol fiend, the opium 
demon, the cocaine siren, the chloral lullaby, do they 
endeavor, with ceaseless persistence, to transform their 
manhood into something other than was given them by 
the gracious hand of God? The old axiom has renewed 
emphasis in men's thoughts to day, that every effect must 
have an adequate and sufficient cause. This has been the 
Ariadne clue that has solved the mystery of m?ny a laby- 
rinth and is being used to-day with wider effect than ever. 
Wise and learned men are investigating to-day, with ij } \ 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 7 

the eyes of Argus, with as many arms as Briarius, and 
there is not lacking in this investigation the gold of Midas 
to solve the problem of the drink habit, the opium habit, 
and all forms of bondage and slavery which transform a 
man into a fiend or eat the core out of his life. 

In answer to this question two theories stand oat 
prominent and noticeable. There is, first, what may be 
called the physical theory. After the mere line of the 
social glass has beenpassed and the element of conviviality 
is no longer the chief factor in the case, men drink because 
the nerves of the tortured stomach cry out for new stimu- 
lation, because the flagging powers must have beneath 
them their accustomed prop. Throwing aside the element 
or factor of their use merely in cases of pain, to woo sleep, 
or wrench apart the tiger fangs of aching nerves, men use 
narcotics, men tie their lives to the dark mile posts of 
opium, cocaine and chloral because the distorted nerve 
cells in their all-distorted bodies clamor for the poison as 
the stomach hungers for food or the lungs demand air. 
This is the physical theory. On the basis of it and along 
the line of it philanthropists and physicians found their 
attempts to save the lives of their fellow-men. 

Then there is the mental theory, not totally distinct 
and divorced from the physical one, but playing along be- 
side it a much larger part in the problem than until re- 
cently men have learned to admit. It is not merely the 
congested stomach, it is not alone the half starved nerve 
cell, it is not only the anaemic brain, it is not merely the 
whole abnormal physical machinery together that offers 
adequate solution; but the laborer drinks, the working- 
man turns his home into a hell, because of the hard, inex- 
orable necessities that cover all his mental firmament with 



8 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

dull and neutral clouds. The human soul is made to pine 
for light, that light that shines down into the heart, that 
floods his life with radiance as the sunlight gilds the 
mountains when it beams on them its morning: benedic- 
tion. This light he cannot find; he does not meet it in 
the hard grind and struggle to put a loaf of bread on the 
table and keep the winter chill out of doors. Plodding 
by day, wearied at night, he instinctively looks around 
him for a little light to pierce these heavy clouds of care. 
He goes to the saloon, and in its warmth and amid its 
hilarity his burden for a little time drops from his shoul- 
ders to the ground beside his feet. He forgets for a few 
hours who and what he is. This fiery fluid that fills for a 
while his life with its lurid light, that is the nearest ap- 
proach that he knows how to find to the elixir of life or the 
draught of Lethe, and so he drinks and drinks until his 
manhood is burned away by the baleful fire of alcohol. 
Your heavily worked physician, your business man taxing 
his every energy to meet the thousand contingencies and 
intense and promising possibilities that are in and all 
around his pathway of daily existence; your author, 
whose book must be spiced up to the demand of modern 
literary taste; your woman of society, who burns the 
candle of life at both ends and then wonders why it burns 
dim or consumes so rapidly, find in the soothing hand of 
opium, in the enchantment of the softly whispered prom- 
ises of morphine, the friend who, with enticing smile, 
shall spread a shimmer of brightness over their extended 
field of incessant care that dogs like a specter their often 
faltering steps. The business man, whose boat rocks on 
the billows in the turbulent waters of the contest for 
wealth and the world's honors, has but to summon to his 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 9 

side the familiar face of the opium Mephistopheles, who 
comes to him at first in angel's guise, and at the word of 
this familiar spirit the winds and the waves are stilled. 
Your devotees of pleasure, as their energies begin to flag, 
and the nerves of their systems, so constantly strung to 
concert pitch, no longer respond as a whole to the normal 
realities of existence, w T ould fain, if it be possible, start 
the wheels around with faster rotation, would put a 
heavier pressure upon the engines of the sensibilities of 
existence, and in the opium dream, the cocaine exhilara- 
tion, the chloral trance, they find what their dulled sensa- 
tions crave. 

The former of these theories is that of the materialist, 
who finds his explanation of most of life's enigmas in the 
potency of matter to account for the facts of life; the 
other is the ground of the idealist, who looks for his ex- 
planation of what he sees and hears in the dominance of 
that mysterious something we term mind in its power over 
matter. Are they both correct? or neither? As usual, 
the truth is more likely to be found between the extremes 
of the swing of the pendulum. A tortured and abnor- 
mally working physical system accounts for a very large 
class of the observable things that we meet in this shadow 
territory of life experience. In the judgment of the 
writer, the part played by the imagination, by the mind 
working in grooves which habit has made familiar and well 
known, must be put into the foreground of this problem 
to account for a large class also. The 2,000,000 lives in 
these United States of America that are bound in the steel 
chains of the drug bondage are in the fearful grasp of the 
tyrant that controls them because of a mind that seeks re^ 
lief, of a brain that cannot apply the brakes to thought, 



10 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

and because of a lesson they have learned too late, that 
these modes of relief which they have sought so eagerly 
have been purchased at the cost of a reconstruction and a 
now abnormal organic structure as well as functional work- 
ing of the entire physical organism. Put these two solutions 
together, give each its adequate scope, and we have gone 
far to reach, if we have not reached, the actual end of the 
explanation of this problem of woe and heaviness. 

We speak of the alcohol habit, of the opium habit, of 
the morphine habitue, of the cocaine fiend, of the chloral 
slave, of the hashish eater; what do we mean? Simply 
that when a certain hour comes around and the clock strikes 
8 or 12 there must be put into their system, as much as 
air or food, that which will produce a result which if not 
attained, will throw all the machinery of life out of gear 
merely because of the tendency of the mind to run in a 
groove. A man has a habit of buttoning his coat in a 
certain way. Daniel Webster is reported to have once 
said that he could change the style and character of his 
spoeches easier than the habit of wearing a certain kind 
of collar. One man has a habit of early rising, another a 
habit of a walk before breakfast, another a habit of a cer- 
tain kind of mode of speech. Is this what we mean and 
all that we mean when we say that a man is in the opium 
habit, merely that custom has taken control of the helm of 
volition and that his habit is a something that has this 
power over his life, and no more ? Listen to the comments 
of men in general, or even to the remarks of physicians, 
and one would suppose that such was an adequate and 
entire explanation of all this class of phenomena. Why 
does a physician, a man of intelligence, a man who sees 
from the beginning to the end of a case of typhoid fever 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 11 

or of acute rheumatism, say to or speak of the man who 
for twenty years has used twenty grains of morphia per 
day, that he can stop if he will ? What is the reason that, 
in this age of the nineteenth century, which has learned so 
fast and is so speedily still learning the lesson of tol- 
erance, which exhausts the resources of modern civiliza- 
tion in the construction of insane asylums and even in the 
ventilation of almshouses, it still speaks in a tone of scorn- 
ful pity, or of contempt without pity, of the man who is 
bound down by chains that are impossible to break? Is it 
because of the stunted mental growth, of the repugnant 
physical appearance, of the victim of drugs that enslave? 
But the nineteenth century has compassion for the lunatic. 
It finds a place, even, in its heart for the imbecile. Why, 
then, does it exhaust all its vocabulary of scorn and play 
with all its artillery of contempt upon the man who looks 
through hopeless eyes out into a darkened world whose 
stars shall never sing to him a morning psalm or an evening 
blessing? Is it because of a total, colossal failure to appre- 
hend the gigantic facts of this whole problem of despair ? 
When it sends its torch of alleviation and searches with 
all the spirit of the enlightened Good Samaritan to find 
the sufferer by the wayside, why does it leave this black- 
est corner of doom and unhappiness unlightened by one 
single ray ? Because it fails to apprehend this one fact, 
the distinction between a habit and a disease; because, 
with all its varied enlightenment, it yet has totally failed 
to grasp the distinction between a moral obliquity and a 
physical infirmity. The distorted child who comes into 
this world with twisted limbs or deformed brain finds 
waiting for its helplessness the warmest corner of mother's 
heart, the softest place upon mother's breast. The distorted 



12 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 



life which wakes to hear the voice of conscience begin 
in the brightness of the new-born morning, with added 
power of expression, the reproaches of the many yes- 
terdays, why is it that distorted life is left to weep its 
tears of woe alone ? Because the spirit of charity of the 
nineteenth century knows so little and seems to care so 
little concerning the present unhappiness or the future 
destiny of these children . of despair. When, from the 
women of America, with their pure, white banner of 
Christian sympathy floating above their yet purer and 
whiter souls of affection, the drunkard in his delirium, the 
victim of alcohol in his deepest and darkest debauch, finds 
extended toward him these hands of love that so nearly 
resemble those that were extended upon the Cross, except- 
ing only the print of the nails, why, in so many homes 
where this shadow of doom sinks down into the hearts of 
all who dwell beneath its roof, is it that the voice of love 
and the hands of helpfulness are never extended there ? 

It was Talleyrand,I think, who once said that a blunder 
was worse than a crime; so may it be said that mankind 
has no such enemy as ignorance. The drunkard may be, 
or may not, the victim of his own indiscretion or the result 
of the combinations of generations of temperaments be- 
hind him, way back through generations of ancestors, that 
make up what we term heredity. In either case, the one 
as well as the other, he finds the same compassion the mo- 
ment that one sigh for a better life falls from his lips, one 
gleam toward a better future shines from his eyes. The 
opium slave, nine times out of ten, so far as all that touches 
the initiatory steps of his bondage, is the victim of cir- 
cumstance. Down from the bloody field of Balaklava 
there comes to us to-day the echo of the appalling sentence; 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 13 

" Some one has blundered." That blunder sent back the 
ranks of the Light Brigade, "not the six hundred." The 
results of the blunder extended but to the heroes that 
fell and to the hearts that looked for their return and 
neither found nor met them. The blunder that writes its 
indelible autograph into the structure of a human soul and 
binds it fast with these awful fetters is as limitless in its 
consequences as human life itself. The greatest step for- 
ward in the path of reform of this generation was when 
the philanthropist was taught by the calm lips of modern 
science that drunkenness speedily passed from a habit to a 
disease. The word reform was written in gilded letters 
when that truth was discerned. When the scales of this 
colossal ignorance as to the older and remoter effects of this 
infinitely blacker bondage drop from the eyes of the people 
of America, the jubilee that will be sung by the celestial 
choir will be one that is equaled in rhythm or in gladness 
only when heaven's anthem is sung that peals over the 
sea of glass when one sinner repents. 

Now, then, what is the distinction between a habit and 
a disease ? That is a habit which a man does merely from 
repetition, which writes no deeper imprint into his life, which 
makes no deeper groove in his soul than is the result 
merely of the accumulation of individual actions, the yes- 
terdays and yesterdays making the path of that action 
easier for to-day and to-morrow. The fingers of the pian- 
ist habituate themselves to rapid and almost automatic ac- 
tion. That is a disease when the structure of some por- 
tion of the physical organism is changed in construction or 
altered in its method of action. If it is a change of struc- 
ture we say the man has an organic disease. If it is a change 
in a mode of action, we say that man has a functional 



14 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

disease. A man with an intermittent heart, whose pulse 
beats vary in time, we say has a functional disease of 
the heart. The man whose heart valves do not com- 
pletely close, where those heart valves have been changed 
in form, we say has an organic disease of the heart. The 
opium habit would be a habit if the effect of the dose of yes- 
terday passed into the system and out of the system and left 
no change or imprint there. The opium habit is a disease, 
provided that in nerve cell or blood corpuscle, in secret 
chamber of the brain, or along the path of the spinal cord, 
change of structure or alteration of function has taken 
place, because of the effect of the poison. Place the nerve 
cell of the normal man under the microscope, and what do 
you see in this living cell into whose recesses the eye of 
modern science has peered in its search for the secret of 
life and what life really is, in this last secret chamber ? 
Place that normal nerve cell beneath the microscope and 
you find a circular or oval membrane filled with a seem- 
ingly colorless fluid, with a small nucleus. Place the nerve 
cell of the morphia habitue beneath the microscope, and in 
these living cells, the last retreat of life, you find evidences 
of structural change. Science, which has measured the 
distance of one world from another, which traces the speed 
across the heavens of the lightning flash, has also measured 
with reasonable accuracy the rate that sensation travels 
along the path of the nerves. That rate of sensation in the 
man whose physical system stands as God created it, has 
one rate of progress; along the path of the nerves of the 
morphia habitue it has another. That process which we 
term assimilation and absorption and elimination, by means 
of which the human body continues to exist, in the normal 
man has one mode of action as to rapidity, as to complete- 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 15 

ness; in the body of the morphia habitue it has another. 
In the body of the opium eater every nerve cell, every 
atom of bodily tissue, has reconstructed itself to meet these 
changed and abnormal conditions. The consequence of a 
habit, with this restriction of significance, is virtually to 
leave the man as he was. Webster could have changed the 
shape of his collar and still been the Godlike Daniel. The 
man who buttons his coat upon the right side can button it 
upon the left and still be the same man. The man who has 
the habit of early rising can remain in bed two hours after 
his usual time and disturb nothing but his comfort. The 
man who walks the earth with structural or functional 
disease written not only upon him but written into him 
and permeating him through and through, the only thing 
that man has to hope for is that death will drop the cur- 
tain or that science will discover relief. Until very re- 
cently, the hearts that loved him, the wife that watched 
over him with a care more intense than mother ever ex- 
pended in looking into the cradle of her child, the children 
that gathered about him when he opened the threshold of 
his door, had but one hope, one anticipation. Much as 
they loved him, bound up and intertwined as their lives 
were with his own, only as they looked into his dead and 
silent face, as he looked back at them from lips that spoke 
no more, only over the opium eater's coffin did the hearts 
that loved him expect that he should know rest on earth. 
About seven weeks ago a leading physician in the 
suburbs of one of our metropolitan cities, a man of emi- 
nent Christian character, an honored member of the Con- 
gregational church, a Sir Knight who stood high in the 
regard of his fellow-Knights, was approached one day by 
a friend who said to him, ' ' Doctor, some of your friends 



16 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

have known for a long time of a very heavy burden that you 
were carrying. They have known how this morphine 
habit was pulling your life in twain. Now, I think, if you 
desire, I can point you to an easy and speedy relief." 
This physician came into the city, was brought into con- 
tact with a fellow- sufferer in another profession, and the 
first time this fellow-sufferer saw him he had that look 
upon his face that you sometimes see in a deer whom the 
hunters have pursued almost to the point of death, an in- 
tense, strained, eager longing for relief, and yet an almost 
hopelessness of finding it. He went home, talked the 
whole matter over with his dear, loyal wife. A few days 
later, she, too, came in and said to the writer of this vol- 
ume: "Doctor Grover, you would not deceive my husband, 
would you ? It would be so cruel to do it. He is trusting 
everything to what you have said to him, He has taken 
nearly thirty grains of morphia a day for the last twenty- 
eight years. Often and often have I waked in the night 
to see if he were still here with me on earth. Only a 
little more than a year ago, a relative of ours passed away, 
dying of this same disease. My hushand almost fell in 
convulsions at her grave, as his thoughts turned toward 
the future and he saw another grave opened there, and his 
own pulseless form its occupant. You couldn't deceive 
him, could you? It would be so cruel," I said to her: 
"Deceive your husband ? He is a fellow-Christian. He is 
a Sir Knight. I would go on my hands and knees by day or 
by night to pass the threshold of your home and bring to 
him relief. By all our trust and grateful love in the common 
Redeemer in whom we both believe, I promise you that if 
he will observe a few simple conditions, yonder sun shall 
not more certainly rise in the east and set in the west on 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 17 

its daily path than that your husband will be as well a man 
as there is in this commonwealth." Twenty-seven days 
passed by. Chains fell from his life forever, broken in 
fragments by a hand as tender and a heart as true as the 
hand and heart of him who broke the shackles on four 
millions of wrists, of dusky wrists, and they dropped to 
the earth with a clang that rang around the world. By 
the genius of one man were those chains broken. One 
Sunday afternoon after those twenty-seven days had passed 
by, this dear woman, who could not trust herself to come 
before, came to see the writer of this volume again. I 
walked with her a few steps to another building and 
brought her face to face with one whose path had been for 
years amid a similar gloom. While it has been my priv- 
ilege to speak for years to some hearts that have said that 
I brought them comfort and blessing in the name of 
Him who bade me carry it, yet I had rather see the look 
I saw on those two ladies' faces that Sunday afternoon 
than to hear the words of any man, however eloquent, or 
to hear brought back to me by others the echoes of my own. 
Can it be possible now that, in this age when colleges 
are becoming universities, that in these years when the 
heavens above and the earth beneath and the waters under 
the earth are probed for their secrets, are wooed for all 
the blessings they may contain, this ignorance which has 
sounded like a knell of doom in the ears of those who 
could only grope in the dark shall still be permitted to 
continue? It cannot be. While the world is learning 
and expressing, as it never learned or expressed before, 
some of the deeper meanings that come chanting to our 
ears like the ever grand requiem of the sea the words of 
Him who said, ct A new commandment give I unto you, 



18 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

that ye love one another"; when here in this menacing 
winter the churches, the great heart of the people, are 
learning that other sentence as they never have learned it 
before, i ' He that giveth unto these little ones that believe 
in Me a cup of cold water only, giveth it unto Me"; with 
this blessed gospel of charity sprinkling the earth with a 
perfume sweeter than the violet, covering it with a bap- 
tism purer than the heart of the lily, shall this one ignor- 
ance be permitted to remain? We speak, but we do not 
know of what we speak, when we say that a man's life is 
dark that does not hope any more. There are two million 
of the brightest men and women in America who do 
know what that sentence means, and what it means to look 
all through the great blue vault above and see no star that 
has not been covered with gloom. We take up our morn- 
ing paper and we say that it seems as though the world 
was becoming full of tragedy. When the hands of the 
lightning bring to us the account of this dark deed and 
that, we stand aghast and appalled before a seeming in- 
crease of crime. But here are two million lives in this 
fair land of ours. Their sighs are heard by the Atlantic, 
their moan of woe goes out upon the blue Pacific beyond 
the golden gate, and every one of those lives carries a 
tragedy in its heart — a silent tragedy. The papers will 
very seldom find it out or speak of it; those that live in 
closest contact know not its full significance; but their 
prayers for relief, we may be very certain, are not far from 
the foot of the great white throne. Those tragedies are 
mostly silent tragedies. The grave closes over them, and 
their accents are hushed forever on earth. To tell the 
story of each one of these two million lives, to point them to 
the one star that shall have healing in its beams for them, 
will be the purpose of the following pages of this book. 



THE OPIUM HABIT— ITS CAUSE, ITS MANIFES- 
TATIONS, ITS CURE. 



"Thou dost, in thy passages of life, make me believe that 
thou art only marked for the hot vengeance and the rod of heaven 
to punish my mistreadings." — Henry TV. 

"That keep the word of promise to our ear, and break it to 
our hope."— Macbeth. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE OPIUM HABIT ITS CAUSE, ITS MANIFESTATIONS, 

ITS CURE. 

To write descriptively upon this most terrible of all 
forms of bondage of which the human organism is cap- 
able, would seem to be the most absolute kind of super- 
erogation after the golden pen of De Quincey has depicted 
its results in letters that seem to burn like flame. I won- 
der how many poor, sick-hearted men, who felt that life's 
doors were closed against them forever and life's oppor- 
tunities lost, have laid down De Quincey's book and felt 
that they were laying down every hope that life contained, 
together with the volume. The purpose of this chapter, 
however, is of a very different nature from that of the 
volume of the king of British essayists. He has painted 
a panorama that blazes before a man's vision as a meteor 
in the sky; my purpose is to raise, not drop, a curtain be- 
fore the anticipations of life and to show how the light of 
the baleful meteor may be transfigured into the beams of 
a serene and calmly burning star. 

in The physiology and pathology of the opium habit. 
What does opium do to this human system of ours ? In 
what way and along what line does it work its fearful re- 
sults ? Into what waters does it carry the ship of life in 
order to wreck it and break it into fragments upon the 
reefs which grind it to pieces and from whose terrible em- 
brace there seems no escape ? Physiology deals with the 
phenomena presented by living organisms. It endeavors 
to solve and read the secrets of the normally working human 



22 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

constitution. Pathology deals with those diseased conditions 
of human life and of the physical organism when structural, 
organic changes have been produced, that lead to abnor- 
mal working of physical forces. The physiology of the 
opium habit: Taken into the human system for the first 
time, in its earlier stages what are the results produced ? 
That depends upon the constitution itself, and is largely a 
matter of temperament. As there are born drunkards, so 
there are born opium eaters. There are men whose sys- 
tems drink up alcohol as the fields in August drink up a 
summer shower. They are born with what is termed the 
alcohol diathesis, and the moment that in early years al- 
cohol passes their lips they instantly cross the threshold 
of the danger line of drunkenness. So, in like manner, 
there are born opium eaters. The man whose first dose 
of opium make him sick at the stomach, produces nausea 
and vomiting and all the unpleasant symptoms that follow 
in the wake of this drug when taken into such an organi- 
zation, may fall upon his knees and thank the God who 
made him that He thus placed a gate whose bars are very 
strong against the most subtle and insidious form of temp- 
tation of which human life is capable. The man whose 
first dose of opium quiets pain and does nothing else, may 
also sing his psalm of gratitude. Men do not live, or 
they should not, under the thraldom of constant pain. 
The resources of modern medicine can guard almost any 
system against a pain which is as constant and as persist- 
ent as the days. The man whose first dose of opium 
starts into action the full activity of the imaginative fac- 
ulty, that puts his fancy into fullest play, that brings 
about that equable calm and exquisite sense of repose, 
that gives him a self-possession as serene as the stars upon 



SHADOWS LIF1ED. 23 

a summer evening, that enables him to spell with the let- 
ters of life's experience that one word which included the 
most blessed gift that was in the possession of even the 
divine Son of God, that gives to him perfect peace, not the 
peace that passeth understanding, but the peace that en- 
ables him to look down into the mirror of human life as 
the eye looks into the transparent waters of Geneva's lake 
and sees mirrored upon its bottom the pebbles sixty feet 
beneath his gaze, he is the born opium eater. Nature has 
furnished him the equipment that brings to his entranced 
vision all the avenues of delight that are carried in the 
palm of this king of drugs. 

EAKLIER STAGES. 

In its earlier stages it brings to a man that condi- 
tion of existence that I imagine must have been the nor- 
mal life possession of those who lived upon this planet 
when the earth was young and before its beauties had been 
dimmed by repetition, that gives to bim that condition of 
primal antediluvian health that was man's highest birth- 
right before the waters that flow from the fountains of life 
had ever become turbid by disease. There are some men 
born into existence whose nervous systems are as tensely 
strung and responsive to touch as were the strings of Ole 
Bull's Stradivarius violin, and when the hand of the master 
had that violin between elbow and chin and swept the 
strings with his bow there rushed forth those ravishing 
melodies which those who heard him will never forget and 
whose music is only to be equaled by the music of the 
spheres. Upon such a temperament, opium begins to 
play the serene and stately anthem whose rhythms change 
as the months go by until the anthem wails its way into the 
dirge and requiem that ends the chapter of his experience. 



24 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

METHOD OF ACTION. 

How does opium do this? We look from oar windows 
now, and in the metropolitan centers of the civilized world 
we behold the wires on which the lightning flashes upon its 
numerous errands at the behest of man. The nervous sys- 
tem is the electric wire of human life. Along its subtle 
currents there flash the messages that life sends inward to 
the brain and the answers that are sent back. These nerve 
currents have their normal mode of action, they have their 
normal rate of speed, and the man whose nervous system 
is in a condition of stable equilibrium, in which it exists un- 
changed and as it came from the creative hand, that man 
is in possession of one of the happiest and most useful of 
all the equipments given to humanity. Cause that life 
current to flow more swiftly, introduce into the human 
system that which causes the nerves of sensation to vibrate 
with more exquisite thrill, and you have in your possession 
a means of deepening, of intensifying, of tracing in brighter 
colors, the inner experiences of a human life. Cause that 
current to flow more slowly, muffle the nerves with that 
which renders them less responsive, and you have in your 
hand that which guards them against pain, that which 
renders them less sensitive to the rude assaults and all 
manner of blows that come to a man from the outer world. 
Opium, in its first stage, as no other drug can do or no 
other agent known to man except drugs of similar capacity, 
will produce the first of these experiences. The later hours 
of its initiatory use in a temperament like that last de- 
scribed, will bring about the latter experience. Combine 
these experiences, produce first the delicious ecstasy of the 
opium trance and follow that by the second condition, that 
of perfect calm, of undisturbed repose, of the unruffled 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 25 

surface of the human soul, which resembles the sur- 
face of a sapphire lake on a June afternoon, and you 
have the second one. When we consider what, to the ma- 
jority of men, the experiences of life consist of, of its con- 
flicts and its turbulence, of its demands and draughts upon 
the strongholds of energy, given such a temperament, Avho 
can wonder that, such knowledge once acquired, with that 
which seems to be the most obedient servant of his life, 
which comes at his call in an instant, which always without 
fail does as it is bid, ultimately, and at no distant day from 
the stage of initiation, the servant becomes the master. 
Reflect upon the fact that De Quincey did not exaggerate 
when he spoke of the portable ecstasy that could be sent 
down in gallons upon the mail coach, of the dreams of 
bliss that could be condensed into the contents of the laud- 
anum bottle, and then remember how the moments of 
care and of trouble, of sickness of heart and often of agony 
of soul are many in the ordinary human life, and then put 
over against them the hours and the days of happiness and 
consider that sometimes these days are far between. You 
then have a part, at least, of the reason that causes the 
ranks of the opium battalions to be always full. No matter 
how many may drop by the wayside, in spite of the num- 
berless graves filled by the forms of those in whose systems 
the knell of despair had sounded all its changes, in spite 
of all this, something of the reason is apparent that renders 
the enlistment in the opium army something that never flags 
nor fails. Modern physiology tells us that, instead of once 
in seven years, every particle of tissue in the human body is 
reconstructed at least once a year. Physically speaking, 
the man who begins to write in his diary upon the first of 
January, 1894, is a different man from the one who wrote 



26 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

down his good resolutions at the beginning of 1893. The 
criminal law of France, with its unique way of looking at 
things, refuses to punish a man for a crime that he com- 
mitted ten or more years ago, on the ground that he is no 
longer the same man. In very many senses no man is the 
same man that he was three hundred and sixty- five days 
ago. Of all the tissues of the human body, the nervous 
system is the one whose changes are the most subtle in 
character, whose results reach farthest and whose abnor- 
mal working produces the most intense results upon 
character. The broken bone unites in a few weeks, and 
when the sufferer from fracture has laid his crutches away 
he walks among his fellow-men virtually the same man 
that he was before his accident. The man whose muscular 
system is injured by bruise or strain or even rupture of 
muscular filaments, upon the reunion and reproduction of 
the muscular fiber does not find that his life has undergone 
any change. Even that tissue of the body whose injury 
is most permanent, the human skin, which is never repro- 
duced in its entirety, yet in spite of such injury his func- 
tional activities and all his interior life workings flow 
on in the old and well known channels. Change, how 
ever, the structure or disarrange the functional workings 
of the nervous system, and you have here an element 
that enters into the problem that produces results far 
different in kind. I have seen the man of unswerving 
integrity whose word was like the solidity of a granite 
column, who was temperate, genial, kind, cordial, whose 
smiles played round the path of his life and lightened 
other hearts as the perfume plays round the dwelling 
place of the rose — I have seen such a man's moral char- 
acter go all to pieces and lie in fragments at his feet 



SHADO WS LIFTED. 27 

under a severe attack of nervous prostration. I have 
seen the strong man become puerile, the man of serene 
temper become more irritable than a sick child, the honest 
man become a liar, the temperate man change to a dip- 
somaniac, the man of pure and chaste thoughts become 
licentious, all because of disordered nerve action. Science 
to-day is bending all its energies and expending all its re- 
sources to discover, if possible, the hiding place of thought, 
to discover the links that bind together the mind and the 
brain, to tell, if it can, what life is, what mind is, what 
conscience is, from what springs their fountains flow. 
Why do they run in this direction or in that ? And, while 
not accepting myself the conclusions of the materialist, 
when I consider, when I remember what I have myself 
seen again and again repeated as to the power of disar- 
ranged nervous function or altered nervous structure to 
make the man all over mentally, morally and even spirit- 
ually, I can hardly wonder that modern physiologists have 
reached the conclusion as expressed by the stout-hearted 
positivist who climbed the Matterhorn and who has re- 
cently passed into the unseen, that in despised and con- 
temned matter he found the " promise and potency of 
every form of life." Nor can I even wonder at the con- 
clusions of the English Huxley or the German Haeckel 
that life in its higher as well as its lower forms, with its 
intelligence and its volition and its moral perceptions, is 
the result of organization, and that even moral character is 
the resultant of the activities of the nerve cell. When, 
therefore, we are dealing with an agent whose whole force 
is expended upon that portion of the physical organism 
that produces results like these, we need not wonder at the 
Protean forms in which the opium fiend writes its auto- 
graph into men's deepest chambers of experience. 



28 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES. 

Let me draw a picture of a case, a typical case, that 
once came under my own observation, of the effect of 
opium upon a temperament of this character. It was 
once my duty to treat a man for an attack of acute rheu- 
matism. This is a disease which has a limit of activity of 
about six weeks. During at least a portion of those weeks 
it becomes necessary to guard against the constant, grinding 
pain. I treated that man by the use of the hypodermic 
syringe twice a day to the extent of giving to him by that 
mode of exhibition about one-third of a grain of morphia 
in the morning and in the evening. I shall never forget 
the revelations of those four weeks. It was the first time 
that it had been my lot to see, at least to carefully ob- 
serve, the effects of this subtle drug upon an organization 
thus responsive. Well do I recollect the day, across the 
gap of twenty-five years, the first time that I heard opium 
sing its siren song. This month, to this family and 
friends, and those who observed him, was called his month 
of suffering. With a smile, containing much of sarcasm 
in its meaning, he used to repeat to me the expression in 
words of irony, < ' my month of suffering. ' ' The disease 
was there; the pain would have been but that its fangs 
were wrenched apart at the waving of the wand of the 
opium master; and other things were there, also. Those 
dissolving views at midnight, that long panorama of stately 
and beautiful images; that undisturbed calm that rendered 
the man, crippled as he was, able to remain in one position 
for six or seven hours, not desiring to move lest the benig- 
nant, smiling faces that opium sent into his waking dreams 
should disappear. The bright conversations by day, the 
literary criticisms that he made, the keen working of 



SHADOWS LIFTED. ■ 29 

every mental faculty, the sharpening of every sensibility, 
and yet a sharpening that carried in its touch not even the 
suggestion of uneasiness; the sentences that he read from 
the books of the great masters whose names are among 
earth's few immortals, and then his comments upon them 
in words almost as weighty as themselves, and in tones 
that glowed and thrilled with rapture, the look in the eyes 
as thought after thought sent its happy suggesting in 
waves that lapped the shores of the soul as the ocean laps 
the edges of the beach — this was what opium carried in its 
hand as a gift to the temperament responsive to its 
touch. This is what opium always gives, an ecstasy in- 
finitely more refined than the grosser delights of alcohol; 
every faculty, everything within the whole capacity of the 
man intensified, almost glorified, in mode and extent and 
beauty of manifestation. And in such a panorama as this do 
we find lying capsulate the cause that makes it possible to 
divide the population of America by thirty, and, so far as 
the metropolitan centers at least are concerned, will en- 
able you to hit with fair accuracy upon the number of 
habitual opium habitues. 

MIDWAY CONSEQUENCES. 

Let us shift the scene, and go back a little farther now 
upon the stage. The last results of all have not yet made 
their appearance. Sometimes these do not come for a score of 
years; often they begin to be visible within a decade. But 
let us deal with some of the mid-results of the opium life. 
The dissolving views at midnight are now all gone, the ex- 
quisite rapture now has ceased, the small doses that were 
at first so potent and so pleasurable are now replaced by 
larger ones; but the earlier features cannot be reproduced. 
To start exhilarating nerve currents by increasing the dose 



30 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

of opium would be as impossible as to produce more 
effervescence by pouring an extra quantity of acid upon 
a salt that had already combined with its full chemical 
equivalent. Now the opium user must take his drug as 
his lungs inhale the air, as the stomach receives the food, 
for the purpose of what ? For the purpose of continuing 
the normal activities of life. The first thing in the morn- 
ing, before the duties of the day can be met, the nerves 
must digest their daily quantum of opium. By this time 
every particle of tissue in the opium eater's system has re- 
constructed itself to meet these changed conditions, and as 
it would be impossible for the sources of life's energy to 
remain always full with constant draughts made upon 
them, the reservoir of capacity being constantly lowered 
and never filled, his life's forces would thus come to an 
end were the man deprived of food, so would those ener- 
gies falter and the exhibition of life's forces be equally 
impossible without the daily draught of what has become 
the food of the nervous system. 

LAST RESULTS. 

Shift the scene again. Go backward still farther upon 
the stage of progress and let us look upon the later scenes 
of all. The ecstasy has gone long, long ago. The pleas- 
urable sensations have disappeared like a mist in a morn- 
ing in midsummer. The nerves have known no thrill of 
exhilaration since the first Judas kisses of the opium fiend 
were given to them in the now by-gone years. Between 
those earlier days, baptized by the opium delight as 
Aurora baptizes the morning twilight, and these later 
scenes of all, there lie the neutral days, be they longer or 
be they shorter. They may have extended — these neutral 
days — when the power of the opium giant was all expended 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 31 

in holding the processes of life's activities to nearly or some- 
thing like their old and normal power. These days may have 
been comparatively few, or they may have massed them- 
selves together and extended over a long score of years. 
Still the morning and the evening of every new-born day 
have brought the habitue, whose feet would have lingered 
along the pathway if they could, but who was powerless to 
stop the walk, walk, the march, march, down this slow in- 
cline; they have steadily brought him to these later scenes of 
all. Where is the opium eater now? He has a body as im- 
pregnated with the subtle poison as the mummies that lie 
in the tombs of the Pharaohs were w T ith the balms that 
have preserved their blackened corpses from dissolution. 
Put his body now under proper chemical tests, and stores 
of isomerized morphine hid away in every receptacle that 
the human body contains could be called forth indefinitely. 
The system now begins to flag. The processes of life are 
dulled. The edge has gone out of everything. Tasks 
that once were as easy of performance as the air is buoy- 
ant on Alpine heights, stand in solemn stagnation before 
his vision like a statue made of lead. His self-possession 
is easily disturbed. The old aplomb, assurance, that old 
life confidence that made him a man among men, the old 
spring in the step, the light in the eye, the flush upon the 
cheek, they have faded away as the sunlight fades in the 
sky at the coming of the April showers. The anticipations 
of life have long since set behind the horizon of the opium 
mountain tops. The opium eater expects nothing, he 
looks for nothing, he waits in patient and somber silence 
for the end to come whose hastening now is the burden of 
almost the only prayer that he addresses to the throne of 
God. He is kind, sincere; cordial he cannot be. The 



32 . SHADOWS LIFTED. 

sensibilities of life are frozen over and glide along almost 
unnoticed, as the Neva flows beneath its frozen surface 
through the center of the Bussian winter. Tears, his 
eyes have almost forgotten what they mean. Smiles, he 
has not known one for years. Unlike the drunkard, whose 
convivial instincts sometimes remain to the very end, 
keeping him out among his fellows and living his dwarfed 
life under a forced hilarity, the opium eater in these last 
stages sits all by himself, isolated, abstracted, waiting for 
the stagnant, solemn current of thought to flow, dreading 
to touch any of the simplest of the activities that are even 
nearest to him, waiting for weeks to even write a letter to 
a friend. There he sits, day after day and night after 
night, in a silence unbroken save by the whispers of the 
ghosts of departed years. His wife comes in to speak 
a word of cheer. It falls upon the surface of his life as 
the snow flake falls into the sapphire depths of a lonely 
lake in a mountain tarn and is lost in its waters. His 
children come around him to utter their happy good morn- 
ing, their smiling good night. No smile from his lips or 
eyes or soul greets them in return. His words are pleas- 
ant, but few. By this shoreless sea of silence he waits for 
the muffled oars of the equally silent boatman to take hini^ 
away from his despair and his waiting far into the heart 
of the mystery that resides the other side of death. 
de qttincey's description. 

The eloquent master of English prose thus describes this 
last scene of all that ends the strange, eventful history: 

"The dream commenced with a music which now I 
often heard in dreams — a music of preparation and of 
awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coro- 
nation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 33 

a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread 
of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a 
mighty day — a day of crisis and of final hope for human 
nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labor- 
ing in some dread extremity. Somewhere — somehow, I 
knew not how — by some beings, I knew not whom — a 
battle, a strife, an agony was conducting, was evolving 
like a great drama, or piece of music; with which my 
sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion 
as to its place, its cause, its nature and its possible issue. 
I, as is usual in dreams (where, of necessity, we make 
ourselves central to every movement), had the pow T er, and 
yet had not the power to decide it. 1 had the power, if 
if I could raise myself, to will it; and yet again had not 
the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon 
me, or the expression of inexpiable guilt. 'Deeper than 
ever plummet sounded,' I lay inactive. Then, like a 
chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was 
at stake; some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had 
pleaded or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden 
alarms; hurryings to and fro; trepidations of innumerable 
^fugitives, I knew not whether from the good cause or 
the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; 
and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, 
and the features that were worth all the world to me, and 
but a moment allowed — and clasped hands, and heart 
breaking partings, and then — everlasting farewells ! and, 
with a sigh, such as the caves of hell sighed when the 
incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death, the 
sound was reverberated — everlasting farewells ! and again, 
and yet again reverberated — everlasting farewells ! 



34 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

"And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud, 'I will 
sleep no more. ' " 

CAUSATION. 

These are the conditions that meet the eye. As near 
as words can paint it, this is what one looking upon the 
opium habitue's life from the outside would see; and, with 
equal endeavor at exactness, I have endeavored to de- 
scribe subjectively, from the interior of life's experience, 
what he himself would feel. Whether life be itself the 
resultant of organization or not, or whether — as I myself 
believe the weight of evidence points — it be itself the 
cause of organization, yet upon either hypothesis this is 
undoubtedly true: The manifestations of life as seen and 
exhibited in the human individuality are largely governed 
and shaped by the method of action of the forces that are v 
themselves resultant upon the structure of the human or- 
ganism. Hence, whether science has as yet discovered, or 
not, the accompanying brain change for every form of in- 
sanity, or whether it as yet eludes our research, this one 
statement will undoubtedly hold that every varying exhi- 
bition of mental action, that everything that indicates the 
interior life of the man as expressed by the man's conduct 
as he walks through life, undoubtedly has its underlying 
cause. The hypochondriac, whose depression of spirit is 
due to his hypertrophied liver, the valetudinarian, whose 
Lilliputian irritabilities are dependent upon his imperfect 
digestion, are no more the product of physical causation 
than a lunatic in the midst of his hallucinations or the 
opium habitue in the calm of his opium trance. What has 
science to say as to the cause of these, at first benignant, and 
at last appalling, symptoms that write in letters of bright- 
ness or in characters of midnight the history of the opium 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 35 

eater's career? What has taken place in his physical 
structure, antecedent to or corresponding with the changes 
that are observed in the man's character and in the man 
himself. Perfect and healthful mental life is doubtless as 
really, if not as plainly and visibly, the action of some 
form of physical structure and physical function as is the 
life of the body itself. Given a brain whose every nerve 
cell is physiologically perfect, a spinal cord whose every 
nerve fiber is an accurate reproduction of the intent of 
nature, a sympathetic nerve system which is as perfect in 
structure and function as it is possible to imagine, and I 
care not what environments may surround the man, what 
difficulties may beset him, what perplexities may be be- 
fore him, that man will meet all life's emergencies as the 
Monitor met the Merrimac in the naval battle off Hamp- 
ton Roads. That man is an iron-clad. His sturdy heart 
will not falter, his solid nervous system will not fail, under 
any of the assaults that may fly thick and fast around him 
from any of the artillery of life. He may be w T earied, the 
evening may find him tired, a sleepless night now and then 
when the emergencies come too fast may see his brain 
wearied as the sunlight greets his eyes in the morning, 
but that man is equipped to meet his life as the Beth- 
lehem shepherd boy was equipped to meet Philistia's giant. 
Had we a nation of men equipped like this, youths like 
the Apollo Belvidere, men like the Farnesian Hercules, 
women like the Venus de Medici (physically), our country 
would sweep on in its path from achievement to achieve- 
ment, because its hills and its valleys, its far stretching 
prairies and its mighty hives of industry would be the 
dwelling place of an energy that would be as tireless as 
the stars in their courses. This is what humanity was 



36 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

meant to be. This is what it would be if men did not 
burn the candle of life at both ends until its bright radi- 
ance dimmed into a spark that had no light in its heart. 
Was it Dr. Watts that said: 

" Strange that a harp of thousand strings 
Should keep in tune so long." 

Whether it was or not, keep the harp in tune and the 
music of life would know no minor key. Life would be 
but a Jacob's ladder, w r hen death should bid "forbear 
to mount higher," whose topmost round would be level 
and coterminous with the surface of the sea of glass. It 
is when the strings of the thousand-stringed harp get out 
of tune that the music dulls into discord. It is when 
want of exercise, luxury, dissipation, allow the strings to 
become loose and untensed that the sounds have-no music 
in their strain. Of all the strings of the harp, the nerve 
fibers are the ones from which the sweetest music comes 
when timed to proper pitch, which produce the most heart- 
piercing discords when distorted and starved by disease or 
external agency. The opium eater is a man whose nerves 
have been muffled for years by morphine. Every nerve 
cell, instead of being round and full and overflowing with 
energy is wrinkled and dwarfed and shrunk. The music 
can no longer sound from the harp, for the strings are 
nerveless and some of them broken. Between the man's 
inmost individuality and the world in which he lives, with 
all its variant and vibrant impressions, between his inmost 
self and the life that touches that self, there is the gap be- 
tween his self and the world about his self, that gap that sur- 
rounds his life as the moats used to surround the old castles 
in the times of the Middle Ages. He is isolated, lonely, 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 37 

apart from his fellows, because those avenues of sensibil- 
ity that bring a man into closest communion with his fel- 
low-men around him, and his God above him, are barred 
by the stakes that have been driven into his life during 
all his long years of habituation by the hand of the opium 
giant. 

Had this treatise been written ten years ago, twenty-five 
years ago at all events, this chapter must have ended here. 
It would have been the saddest Misereri ever sounded in 
the ears of man. It would have been impossible to have 
spoken words that would have had within them much ac- 
cent of cheer or uplift to the poor opium victim's heart. 
He must meet the end as best he could, or be prepared to 
endure tortures that few human systems can withstand. 
De Quincey's masterly pen describes, with as lurid empha- 
sis as though its point had been dipped in the bitterness of 
hell, the experiences that must await the opium habitue on 
his path to freedom. After two attempts, says this gifted 
writer, after two attempts, when,after sufferings that seemed 
as intense as endless, he had succeeded in breaking his bonds 
twice, upon a tbird attempt his mournful failure compelled 
him to say in those words of pathos that reverberate like 
a requiem in a heart surcharged with misery: " I looked 
for the third time, and I saw those towering gates of ingress, 
which until now had seemed to stand wide open, clang to- 
gether, barred and shut and hung with funeral crape." 
The sentiment that all is lost silently was gathered up into 
his heart, and where sympathy cannot be consolation and 
counsel cannot be hope, the voice perishes, the gestures are 
frozen and the spirit of man flies back upon its own center. 
u I, at least, upon seeing those awful gates closed and 
hung with draperies of woe, as for a death already passed, 



38 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 



spoke not, nor started, nor groaned. One profound sigh 
ascended from my heart and I was silent for days." This 
is not exaggerated language, these are not the words of a 
man writing for effect. Until within a number of years, 
the morphia habitue could count upon the fingers of both 
hands any even pretended avenues of escape. De Quincey's 
Suspiria de Profundis has found its echo at the bottom of 
every opium eater's soul. Had this book been obliged to 
end its chapter thus, this book would have remained for- 
ever unwritten. The world needs no more additions to its 
library of woe. The vocabulary of sorrow is ample enough, 
without searching for new and stronger terms. It is to 
unclose the gates, it is to remove from their somber color- 
ing that drapery of woe, that these words are given to the 
world. Can these gates of ingress that closed upon De 
Quincey be opened to the morphia habitue of to-day? They 
can. The writer speaks not merely from his own expe- 
rience, but from that repeated by scores of his fellow-men. 
The man of genius, whose keen intuitions, whose elegant 
and subtle touch discovered the key that unbarred these 
gates, speaks from an experience, not of tens or of scores 
or of hundreds, but of thousands. There can no possible 
combination of symptoms arise along the path of the mor- 
phia habitue's experience, that Dr. Bellinger has not met 
and combatted with success. In his long train of victories 
there is not one single defeat, provided that the structural 
life processes have not been invaded almost to the extent 
of dissolution. 

HOPE AND CURE. 

What must a cure for opium be? What must it do? 
Along what lines must it work? What must be its aim 
and its intent? To answer this question, we must consider 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 39 

the symptoms consequent upon the use of the poison and 
upon its attempt at abandonment. The suffering of an 
opium eater means what, upon the attempt at the aban- 
donment of the drug ? It means nerve nakedness. It 
means, with the nerves that have been muffled in morphia 
all these years, that the muffled coverings which sur- 
rounded them are now being removed. These structural 
changes of the nerve tissue that have taken place conse- 
quent upon the long-continued use of the drug would have 
been felt going on in the opium eater's system except that 
the opium which produces them is itself an anodyne and 
masks the consciousness of their existence: When that 
process is reversed and the reconstructed system of the 
opium eater must be reconstructed again, the anodyne 
which masked the consciousness of their existence while he 
was walking along into the pathway of the opium disease 
is no longer present to control the exhibition of that ter- 
rible power. Hence, the opium habitue finds himself in 
the midst of a condition of pain and of suffering and of 
woe and of agony unmatched and matchless by any other 
conception or exhibition of the power of the human sys- 
tem to suffer pain. As De Quincey said, "I used to feel 
as a man described once to me his feelings who had been 
stretched upon the rack." 

What are the symptoms met with consequent upon an 
attempt at abandonment of the drug ? Into these symp- 
toms the morphia habitue passes within a very few hours 
beyond the time of his accustomed dose. Among other 
features of this subtle nerve poison is the necessity for its 
periodicity. By the experience of the years, the nerve 
centers of the opium habitue have accustomed themselves 
to the renewal of the effects of the poison at stated intervals. 



40 SHADOWS LIFTED. ' 

and it is upon the breaking of this periodicity that the 
earlier suffering depends. Within a very few hours the 
sufferer loses what little self-possession he has. He 
becomes apprehensive and timorous. He starts at the 
slightest sound. He becomes drenched in perspiration, 
which flows from him as though a constant shower bath 
were pouring down its rain upon his head. The stomach, 
accustomed to the stimulus under whose power it alone for 
years has been able to act, refuses food, all appetite dis- 
appears. The secretions of the system, long locked up in 
the opium vice, all reassert themselves w 7 ith an intensity 
that is overpowering. The eyes flow with unbidden tears. 
Every pore of the skin pours forth its function of- rain. 
The bowels start into an activity that it seems would drain 
the entire fluids away from the system within a few 
hours. And now come those darker and heavier symp- 
toms. The brain, long free from hallucinations — for, un- 
like hashish, chloral and cocaine, opium seldom disturbs 
the normal action of the mind to the extent of producing 
hallucinations until the later stages come, which end in in- 
sanity or death, but upon its abandonment come the spec- 
ters which seem to march into life's interior in a ceaseless 
column. Everything that is distorted, everything that 
plays upon his fears, everything that unmans him, all that 
reduces him to a pitiable, shivering, suffering w T reck of 
humanity, attacks him at once. One moment he is in the 
embrace of a fever that seems to burn into his vitals, the 
next he is in the icy grip of the king of cold. Up and down 
his spine, up and down his limbs, dart strange, unnatural 
pains. It seems as though every bone in the body had a 
separate nerve to ache. In this condition, sleep flies from 
his life with a shriek. There is an infinite extension of 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 41 

the sense of the passage. of time. Whether there is any 
other man that knows it or not, the army of opium eaters 
all understand the deeper and more hidden significance of 
the solemn sentence of Holy Writ, "One day is as a 
thousand years." The opium eater shuts his eyes with 
what little volition he still possesses and endeavors to hold 
himself quiet by sheer power of will that the hours may 
pass more rapidly. He lies upon his bed of torture, holds 
his eyes fast closed until he thinks an hour or two has 
passed, and opens them to find that perhaps two minutes 
have glided by. It seems to him that every day contains the 
heart of an eternity. And this condition of human agony 
does not mean an attack for a day or a week, but, as De 
Quincey says himself in relating his own experience, after 
four months had passed he was still the writhing, trem- 
bling, suffering fragment of a man that he was at the end 
of the fourth or fifth day of his attempt to win back his 
freedom. 

The world, with its strange ignorance, knows little of all 
these dark symptoms. In an article written but a few 
months since, of considerable rhetorical power, which ap- 
peared in the New York World, I find the following sen- 
tence: that "morphine habitues are peculiarly susceptible 
to cold, and pneumonia and kindred diseases carry them off 
by scores and hundreds." No opium eater who reads that 
sentence will fail to see that the writer was endeavoring to 
describe what he knew nothing about. An opium eater with 
a cold ? Why as De Quincey says, he did not have a sus- 
picion of a cold all the years of his addiction. There are 
some diseases against which the opium eater is clad in mail. 
A cold or any inflammation of the internal membranes of 
the body is to the opium eater a practical impossibility. 



42 • SHADOWS LIFTED. 

The opium eater will go into a hospital crowded with yel- 
low fever patients and never take the" disease. He will 
walk along through hospital wards crowded with typhus 
and typhoid, virtually impregnable to their contagion. The 
drug, while making havoc with the interior citadels of life, 
seems to protect the man against some of these ulterior 
incidents to which the ordinary man is liable. It wrecks 
him in its own way, tolerates but little interference with 
its absolute dominion and kingship. The time when the 
morphia habitue is liable to colds and pneumonia is when 
he is attempting to abandon the drug or along the earlier 
months of his dearly bought victory. 

Such are the more prominent features, and this is the 
more visible panorama of suffering which the opium eater 
has to meet as he enters and passes the threshold of his at- 
tempt. Now, what has medical science done for the opium 
eater, since the time when the use of this drug was becom- 
ing so fearfully common and wrecking so many lives, the 
brightest lives usually, for the constitution and tempera- 
ment that make the born opium eater are the resultant of 
the highest bloom and fruitage of civilization ? What has 
science done for him, what has medical art had to say to 
him, until these very recent years ? Practically nothing. 
Even to-day, not the average practitioners, but the trained 
specialists, when they told him the truth and nothing but 
the truth, had very few words of hope to offer. The aver- 
age man, skeptical as he always is of what he has not 
himself experienced, says to him, "Show your manhood, 
if you have any. Stop the use of the drug that is killing 
you. When a sensible man finds a thing that injures him, 
he throws it out of his life." Sometimes you are met by 
the divine injunction, "If thy right hand offend thee, cut 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 43 

it off." But the hand which the opium eater himself cuts 
off in order to cast the enemy out of his life, must be, 
and has always been, the right hand of bis very self. He 
must dissever himself from his own individuality before he 
could experience relief. To tell the confirmed morphia 
habitue, whose system had been permeated by the drug 
poison to the extent of nervous reconstruction, and tissue 
reorganization to stop by an effort of will, would be about 
as effective as for the ordinary man of to-day to attempt 
to repeat the experience and reproduce the miracle of the 
Man of Nazareth as He bade, upon the surface of Galilee's 
lake, the winds and the waves to be still, and expect them 
to down at his bidding. Macbeth found one ghost that 
would not disappear at his summons. The morphia habitue 
knows that his specter of Banquo stands in the center of 
his life, laughing at his command that it disappear. Thus 
the poor victim of the worst disease that has ever invaded 
humanity's citadel of life has found himself not only help- 
less and alone, but the victim of an ignorance as unreason- 
able as unscientific. 

ATTEMPTS AT CUKE. 

What have been some of the earlier attempts to aid the 
victim in his efforts % Go to Germany to-day and you will 
meet, if you care to see it, the famous sanitarium of Lev- 
enstein. The morphia patient is received there for treat- 
ment. What is done with him ? Perhaps of himself, un- 
aware of the agony he undergoes, he voluntarily consents 
to his friends' attempt at putting him under conditions of 
relief. He is put into a padded room. The walls above 
his head are carefully protected against his despairing at- 
tempts to end his own life. There is not a particle of fur- 
niture in the room that is not equally thus guarded. A 



44 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

strong trained attendant is placed there with him, and the 
so-called treatment is begun. What is the treatment % 
To very rapidly or perhaps entirely shut him off from 
the accustomed stimulant that has alone for years given 
him quietude or relief. There he is kept, there he must 
suffer. If he falls into a collapse, if the powers of the 
system seem to be about to entirely fail, he is given 
just a minute portion of his accustomed drug, just barely 
enough to make him conscious of his misery again, and 
he is kept there and the weary days drag by until, if 
he is a man of exceptional power of constitution and has 
left enough remaining of that subtle something that we call 
vitality, he is given back broken, shivering, a fragment of 
a man, to his friends. 

What have been some of the later methods in this same 
direction? I knew a man, a man of wealth and standing 
some thirteen years ago, that surrendered himself to the 
direction of the physicians in control of a prominent sani- 
tarium in this country. He gave them legal control of him 
for a specified period. Something like a week after his 
entrance there, when in the stress of the opium agony, he 
approached the physician in charge and said to him, ' i Give 
me back that paper that I gave to you, giving you legal 
control of me for a specified time. Here is a large sum of 
money. Take it. Tear up the paper and let me go." 
The physician, with kind heart, probably, but with terribly 
mistaken judgment, laughed at his appeal and neglected 
his warning. This sharp, keen man of businesses he was, 
went directly back to his room, moved aside the marble 
top of the bureau there, took the blade of a very small 
razor, lay upon the bed with a hand mirror before his face 
and in an instant severed the carotid artery, and the news 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 45 

was flashed over the wires to the city where I then lived 
that he had committed suicide. In this sanitarium, the 
mode of treatment was the rapid reduction of the drug and 
the attempt to sustain the system by means of whatever of 
tonics the modern pharmacopoeia contained. During the last 
quarter of a century everything in the known repertoire 
of therapeutics has been used over and over again to find 
some avenue by which the poor victim could march to his 
freedom with mitigation of his sufferings. The remedies 
of the bromide class, in some of the more prominent sani- 
tariums, have been used even to the point of keeping the 
sufferer unconscious for days at a time. 

Often after such an experience the sufferer would come 
forth, living, to be sure, but with the mainsprings of life 
all broken. The writer, some two years ago, together 
with the assistance of one of the ablest nervous specialists 
that this country contains, devoted many weeks of time to 
running through the entire list of tonic and sedative 
remedies, importing from Europe all that the resources of 
modern chemistry had succeeded in discovering. While 
we were able to control and mitigate many of the more un- 
pleasant incidental symptoms, it was always necessary for 
a certain amount of the drug itself to be present in any 
combination we could devise. Scattered all over the 
country to-day are nerve cure retreats, nerve rest asylums, 
sanitariums without number, where the treatment of this 
disease is attempted and where, in some instances, with a 
greater or less degree of accompanying unhappiness, with 
more or less suffering to be undergone, the patient, if him- 
self possessed — which morphia habitues rarely are — of a 
sufficient amount of volition or remaining strength of 
constitution, may succeed in coming out into life again 



46 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

freed from the use of the drug. But there then remains 
a long time in which the sufferer, with unstrung nervous 
system, with great loss of energy and no small degree of 
insomnia, finds himself for an indefinite period still crav- 
ing, his whole system still crying out for the old drug that 
in its one hand carried relief from pain and in its other 
created it. De Quincey, to quote once more from the great 
author, says that "nervous irritability is the secret deso- 
lator of lif e. " The difficulty is with all these so-called 
cures, much nervous irritability still remains. The patient, 
after having been pronounced a cured man, still finds his 
system reaching out for some form of support, constantly 
longing for something either to sustain it or to soothe it. 
This is hardly to be wondered at, for the brilliant Fitz 
Hugh Ludlow once said: u The effect of alcohol upon the 
human system, after even its abuse for the greater portion 
of a lifetime, as compared with that of opium used for a 
comparatively limited period, so far as the suffering con- 
sequent upon its abandonment is concerned, is as the clutch 
of an angry woman compared with the embrace of Victor 
Hugo's Pieurve." Morphia expends its strength most 
largely upon the nervous system, and any remedy, to do 
what a remedy must do, that is worthy of the name of 
cure, must to a great degree be able to steady and sup- 
port the system against the ravages that the drug has 
brought about during this long period of convalescence, 
while the entire system is being reorganized and recon- 
structed. The vaso-motor system of nerves, the relaxa- 
tion of which is the cause of the profuse perspirations; 
the comparatively feeble action of; the heart and abnor- 
mal condition of the circulation, from Avhich proceeds 
the feeling of self-distrust and that attitude of mental 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 47 

timorousness and shrinking, which are so characteristic of 
the opium user in his later stages — these must be sus- 
tained until nature recovers her wonted equilibrium. 

The profuse diarrhoea resultant upon the relaxed con- 
dition of the inner coats of the intestines, which causes the 
sufferer such constant inconvenience and produces so gen- 
erally a sense of prostration, this must be combatted as 
well. When we remember that this one drug is the strong- 
est alleviative known to medical science, the one whose 
pain killing properties render it facile princeps in its power 
to quell and subdue pain, when we consider that this one 
drug standing peerless and alone among all others of the 
sedative and narcotic class, has lost its power upon the 
system habituated to its use, we can understand the signi- 
ficance of Ludlow's language as he says: "I shall never 
forget the look of horror upon that fearful Chinese face 
that I once saw outside the door of an opium joint in San 
Francisco, at six o'clock in the morning. Its look of ter- 
ror was so haunting that I reined up my horse beside him 
and made the sign of the pipe, proposing in pigeon 
English to furnish the necessary coin, as he spread out 
his hands in front of him with the palm extended down- 
ward toward the ground and slowly shook his head. 
He was what is called an opium fiend, and his gesture 
meant that he had gone to the end of the opium rope. 
The drug had nothing more to give him." And when 
this most mighty alleviative has lost its power to alleviate, 
when this one drug has bestowed its last Judas kiss and 
has nothing more to give, the condition of the sufferer is, 
indeed, past all words. During the past year it has been 
the fortune of the writer to hear related the case of a well 
known New England business man, who was endeavoring, 



48 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

in addition to his daily quantum of the drug, to sustain his 
failing system with large amounts of alcohol, and to hear 
related his experience at one of the European sanitariums 
where the system of rapid reduction is practiced. He 
said that after a confinement of several days, he told the 
attendant placed in charge of him that it would be worth 
a large sum of money for him to turn his head away for a 
few moments that he might secretly leave the walls of his 
prison house of torture. This man said that to pile the 
room in which he was confined with diamonds, or to give 
him $1,000 per minute, would not be the slightest temp- 
tation to pass through again those days of agony. It is 
not three months since a bright young physician, who had 
passed the summer at one of these sanitariums where this 
method of rapid reduction, together with the administra- 
tion of one of the so-called modern cures, was also used, 
said in my hearing that nothing that he could conceive of 
on earth would induce him to pass through the experience 
of those weeks again. They all fail in the two essentials 
of a perfect opium cure. They fail first in their ability to 
sustain the system of the patient in such a manner that he 
can pass through his weeks of treatment without shock in 
any way to the already shocked and weakened system. 
They fail, secondly, in the fact that they leave the patient 
in such condition that his future abstinence is largely, if 
not wholly, a matter of sheer volition, with the system 
still calling for the well known nepenthe and with the re- 
sistance to that craving a mere matter of the will. The 
time is sure to come when the patient will lapse again into 
the arms of his old bondage. The craving, the demand 
of the system, that peculiar condition of mental and ner- 
vous unrest which is something specific in kind and which 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 49 

only the opium eater knows, is either constant, a some- 
thing that is within him by day and by night, or, if by 
reason of constitution or of circumstance he has been able 
to resist it for the time, it is sure to return and make its 
attack at some moment when the will, the sentinel that 
guards these weakened life positions, has for a time relaxed 
its vigilance, and then, at some moment of temptation, 
some door of invitation opening suddenly and almost with- 
out warning, the patient finds himself a slave again almost 
before he fully realizes the fact. 

THE PERFECT CURE. 

The perfect opium cure must be a something that for a 
season almost supplies that part of the man which is lack- 
ing in the man himself. It must be an ally so potent and 
so constant that it shall lock arms with the sufferer w T hose 
faltering steps are so wont to stumble, and that shall sus- 
tain him when weary, shall support him when faint, and 
shall whisper words of encouragement into his ear when 
he falters or falls by the way. It must be a something 
whose wand shall have magic enough in its waving to give 
to him, during his period of early abstinence from the 
drug, nights of refreshing slumber. The perfect cure 
must be potent enough to sing a lullaby that shall charm 
the patient's tortured nerves and weary brain into the land 
of slumber. It must be able to make a living reality of 
the old nursery song, "Thy mother is shaking the dream- 
land tree." One of the most torturing and tormenting 
features of the attempt by rapid reduction or any other 
mode that has until of late been known, was not the tend- 
ency but the certainty of a long period of insomnia. The 
opium eater knows just how many minutes and seconds 
there are between the twilight of the evening and the 



50 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

dawn of the morning. He knows just how the bells sound 
when they toll out the hours of the long night watches. 
He has learned to distinguish the different tones that come 
from their brazen throats. The opium eater knows, if no 
one else does, what a silence broods over the earth in the, 
to him, seemingly endless hours of the midnight darkness. 
How he longs and longs upon his bed, which gives him no 
ease, for the rising of to-morrow's sun, whose beams, when 
rising, give to him so little promise of relief. The opium 
eater knows what it is to sit among friends at such periods 
as this with listless countenance, uninterested in all the 
details of life. He realizes what it is to be bound down 
with something that seems to have paralysis in its touch 
as it lays its finger upon every energy of his life. At such 
a period as this, the period of enforced abstinence, thoughts 
come rolling in upon the brain, as the ocean sends in its 
message by the waves from its far-off horizons. The 
thoughts come, but they do not stay. He has no power to 
grasp them. They come and go, fleeing through the cham- 
bers of his mind like uneasy ghosts. He sees, for this 
drug has little influence upon the faculties of perception, 
the tasks of life, how many they are, how promising, but 
when he puts forth his arms to grapple with them those 
arms fall in uselessness by his side. All this is the story, 
not of one day, but of the weeks that mount upward into 
the months. T received a letter some two years since from 
a man who had passed through one of these sanitariums, 
written five months after his period of release, and he 
wrote to me then that he thought he ought to be consid- 
ered very heroic for being able to make the effort to write. 
The difficulty standing in the way of a perfect opium cure 
is that the gateway must be opened again by means 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 51 

resembling, in greater or less degree, the influences and 
powers which closed it; but what shall cope with this king 
of drugs to hurl him from his throne when his arms are ex- 
tended to embrace so much of the sufferer's life within their 
sweep, without wrenching and tearing the sufferer's life 
in twain as well? Those milder drugs of the sedative 
class which produce perceptible and visible results upon a 
normal system might as well be scattered upon the floor 
as to be placed in the stomach of an opium eater. You 
might as well pour bromides into a gun barrel, expecting 
aid or help, as to put them into the system of an opium 
eater, unless they were pushed to the point of unconscious- 
ness. This has been the problem before the whole med 
ical world ever since the time that this drug began to be 
used in such ways as to form a habit; this has been the 
enigma remaining not only unsolved but seemingly in- 
capable of solution. 

Has that problem been solved to-day ? Is there in this 
month of January, 1894, a perfect opium cure known ? 

Dr. Bellinger is one of those enthusiasts in the pursuit 
of science and in behalf of humanity that are one of the 
highest products of Christian civilization. The man whose 
life is passed in constant outlook of soul toward his fellow- 
men, whose daily and yearly efforts of body and of mind 
are all exerted for the purpose of banishing some shadow 
from men's lives and hearts, comes the nearest to follow- 
ing in the footsteps of the Divine Physician from Nazareth 
that this earth ever sees. Such a man as that loses sight 
of self, because his keen, beneficent vision is filled with the 
sight and vision of countless other selves. Into the hands 
of such a man, this peerless remedy, devised by the Ger- 
man medical director, fell. Upon that knowledge coming 



52 SHABO WS LIFTED. 

to his soul, he set at work, with careful, deliberative and 
incessant scrutiny, with accuracy of observation that 
never flagged or tired, to bring it to all possible point of 
perfection, working for years to find that which the world 
had never found. At last he found it. Beginning some 
years ago in the west, his experience has steadily broad- 
ened and widened,- an experience achieved all along the 
great cities of our Pacific coast, the number of observa- 
tions constantly accumulating, year by year adding to the 
long list of burdened and enslaved lives freed from their 
bondage of darkness and of curse, cases mounting into the 
hundreds and then into the thousands, until at the present 
moment it is far within the language of exaggeration to 
say that there is no possible or conceivable aspect of the 
resultants of all forms of drug bondage that this man has 
not seen and met. Morphine, cocaine, chloral, hashish, 
strong as these fiends are of grip on human life, they at 
last met one whose grasp was stronger than their own. 
Opium, which in its subtle insidiousness and tireless per- 
sistence seems sometimes to be almost a living thing, 
which holds its grasp upon a human life as the devil fish 
drags its victim down into the bosom of the ocean dark- 
ness, this giant monster found at last its master. 

Speaking with all deliberation, knowing that this book 
will not only be read by thousands of morphia victims but 
will pass under the critical eye of many physicians also, 
the writer stakes his reputation for truth and veracity, 
pledges his standing among men and their esteem for him 
as a man whose word can be believed, and states without 
the slightest fear of contradiction that there is no possible 
instance, no conceivable case of opium habituation, no 
phase of the opium disease, that this man has not met 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 53 

and subdued. Let any case, no matter how bad, no mat- 
ter to what monstrous figures the daily ration of opium, 
cocaine or any other of those enslaving drugs may have 
reached, provided that none of the great organs that hold 
the citadel of life itself, like the heart, is attacked and 
no organic lesions, the result of some major surgical ope- 
ration, have rendered the drug necessary and might re- 
turn if it were withdrawn, any opium case the ravages 
upon whose human system were due to the eif'ects of the 
drug per se, be named; the writer stakes his reputation 
as a physician, his word as a man, that there is no case 
to be found on earth that Dr. Bellinger's cure will not 
perfectly subdue. 

CASES STATED. 

The writer is given the following illustration from the 
lips of a man, who, himself a physician, noted down with 
extreme painstaking and care his experience with the Bell- 
inger cure. This gentleman says: 

' ' My attention w T as first called to the work of the Ger- 
man Remedy Co. early in October. I had long before 
endeavored to free myself, by every known treatment that 
to my knowledge the world contained, from a habituation 
to the opium bondage extending over a quarter of a cen- 
tury. I began the use of opium itself in the year succeed- 
ing the close of the w r ar, because of malaria and chronic 
diarrhoea. Being unfortunate enough to possess one of 
those De Quincey-like temperaments, I found myself fast 
in its fetters before I realized the fact. My fright upon 
realizing where I w^as and what I was, led me to those 
attempts at self -emancipation whose torments every opium 
eater who has ever made similar ones knows so w T ell. The 
years passed away, and I had settled down to the thought 



54 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

that I should be obliged to use the drug during my entire 
lifetime. I was enabled to continue my practice, with 
more or less of weakness and difficulty. Early in the '70s 
I used, for some ten years, three or four of the leading so- 
called cures sent to be used by the patients at their homes. 
I found some relief from most of them, but, either from 
want of resolution or lack of persistent determination, 
failed to find freedom in any of them. I entered several 
different sanitariums, in all but one of which I failed to find 
relief at all. In that one I was freed from the use of the 
drug itself more than once, the difficulty being that I could 
never succeed in holding a grip upon myself long enough 
for the system to be entirely reconstructed. This might 
have been due to weakened volition upon my own part, or 
the lack of something that enabled the system to hold itself 
together without such an effort of will. Be it the one or 
the other, I relapsed several times. 

On the 26th day of last October I entered the offices 
of the German Remedy Co., in the Hotel Pelham in the 
city of Boston for the first time. As I entered the door, I 
looked into the faces of two men whose names will never 
be absent from any prayer that I may ever make so long 
as I live on earth. My now honored and loved friend, 
Judge Bronson, of Cambridge, greeted me as I entered the 
portal of the room. His kindly greeting and beaming ex- 
pression of good will to men that shone upon his face, as it 
lit up once for the Bethlehem shepherds the sky above the 
Chaldean plains, will never be forgotten. Dr. Harrison, 
who was then medical director of the company in the 
east, Dr. Bellinger himself being in the west, took me into 
his private office for a few moments' conversation. I said 
to him, ' Doctor, I tell you frankly that I have an utter 



iSHADO WS LIFTED. 55 

disbelief in the possibility of the deliverance of the hu- 
man system from the opium bondage without some incon- 
venience, weakness, languor and suffering. ' He said to 
me, ' Our patients all say that. Who wonders that they 
have that disbelief ? But you feel that your system needs 
relief. Why not come here for two or three weeks, begin 
our course of treatment, which you can stop at an}^ time that 
you care not to continue it longer, and see if we make one 
single promise to you which we do not keep. We ask 
neither from you nor from any other patient one dollar of 
remuneration until our work is done, not only to our satis_ 
faction, but to your own. ' Such a basis of proposal as 
that could not but inspire confidence, and as soon as my 
business matters could be arranged I came to Boston to be- 
£in the course of treatment. The leading editor of one of 
the prominent journals of New England had said of me to 
a friend, ; If that treatment succeeds with my friend it cer- 
tainly will cure any case that lives, ' for I had been proverb- 
ially, owing to the intensity and extreme development of 
the nervous system, a very difficult case to treat. 

" I began treatment as directed, and every dose of medi- 
cine that I was given was made the object of a scrutiny and 
study of its effects that did not cease until the next one 
was administered. For the first four or five days the sys- 
tem felt so strong and well that long nights of dreamless 
sleep, that luxury that is so long absent from the older 
opium habitues' lives, led me to believe that, if not admin- 
istering the drug itself in combination with powerful 
tonics, it was something very, very similar to it. One 
morning, after being upon treatment for about a week, I 
met the following condition, which was proof positive, as 
it must be to every opium eater, that the treatment was 



56 SHADO WS LIFTED. 

not by redaction nor by administration of the drug itself: I 
took my morning treatment at eight o'clock. For two hours 
and a half I felt not the slightest influence of the remedy. 
Then it seemed to produce its ordinary effect and with per- 
fect comfort carried the system along for two or three 
hours more. I saw this peculiarity of the remedy even 
more strongly manifest in the person of another physician 
who was also under treatment. He received his morning 
dose. It did not affect him. Three hours later he was 
given another, one hour after receiving which he left the 
office, stating that he still failed to feel any influence from 
them. As he did not return at the usual hour of the after- 
noon, I went to his residence to find out the reason why. 
The doctor was not at home. He entered the office some 
three hours later, making a similar statement, that, upon 
reaching his home the remedy produced its usual result and 
his system had not needed any more until that hour of the 
evening at which he returned. This was proof positive to 
me, who knew the ins and outs of this subtle agent so well, 
that the cure was not being effected by some mode of ad- 
ministration of lessening quantities of the drug itself, for 
the opium eater knows, especially he who has used it 
hypoclermically, that the relief he experiences is immedi- 
ate, almost instant, while four or five hours later finds the 
influence of the dose nearly gone. I was constantly look- 
ing through the days and through the weeks for symptoms 
that did not appear. The old-time profuse perspiration, 
the loss of energy, the sleepless nights, the loosened con- 
dition of the bowels resulting in a constant diarrhoea, that 
indescribable condition of unease and unrest so Avell known 
and so tormenting, with the eye of a hawk I was watching 
for those symptoms day by day, but the symptoms did not 
appear. 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 57 

"I went through the course of treatment, passed out 
beyond it, hardly knowing when the specific treatment 
ceased to be administered, and with a system as quiet, 
calm and almost as strong as in the earlier years before 
the use of the drug was begun. I had lost some fifteen 
or twenty pounds of flesh, which caused a thinness of the 
countenance and a general look of some want of robust- 
ness, which is experienced in most of the cases, but not in 
all. Upon cessation of the treatment, however, the end 
being reached, the flesh lost during its progress was re- 
gained more rapidly than it was lost. Neither during the 
progress of treatment nor at the period of its cessation 
was there any of the dreaded insomnia. Neither were 
there any of those results which the opium eater has so 
learned to look for and from which he shrinks so fearfully. 
Only a few days scattered along here and there of a little 
want of nerve power, some little consciousness of lassitude, 
indisposition for exertion, that was all that the closest 
scrutiny enabled me to detect during the entire course of 
treatment. Owing to the fact of my intensely nervous 
organization, and of a few complicating symptoms scat- 
tered along through the way, I was myself under treat- 
ment much longer, I found, than the usual patient. " 

The w r riter describes a case that came under his own 
observation, somewhat different from the last. This 
patient was also a physician, a physician of large practice, 
a man of perfect integrity. He had been the victim of 
the opium disease for about twenty-eight years, taking, 
during the last tw r enty years of that time, about thirty 
grains of morphia per day. This gentleman began treat- 
ment late in the month of November, 1893. He was 
warned not to expect to be able to continue his practice 



58 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

during all the time of treatment, as the remedy is not in- 
tended to supply the demands made upon the system for 
an unusual amount of energy. Circumstances seemed to 
demand that he make his medical calls every day, which 
he did. The writer was able to see this gentleman every 
four hours during his entire course of progress, and 
watched him with exceeding care. His was a tempera- 
ment widely different from the case just given. His was 
not as nervous an organization. He was a man in whom 
the phlegmatic element of temperament was more largely 
developed. He began treatment after a constant and un- 
intermittent use of the drug for the long period of almost 
thirty years, using these enormous quantities without ces- 
sation or break. In just twenty-seven days from the time 
he took his first dose of the remedy he w r as entirely through 
his treatment, had carried on his practice during the entire 
period of its administration, and at its close was so filled 
with a depth of conviction~as to its possibility of blessing 
and benefit to his fellow- men that he disposed of his large 
and lucrative practice, the results of the labors of twenty- 
five long years, to take the medical direction of one of the 
larger institutes in the United States. 

It may be asked, How does a remedy act possessing 
such potency as this and achieving results so beneficent? 
It acts first by direct influence upon the nerve centers, 
supplying them with that artificial energy which prevents 
the motor nerves from relaxing and drenching the sufferer 
with the opium perspiration, by a toning effect upon the 
cells and fibers of the brain and spinal cord, thus guarding 
against the fever flushes and the icy cold that grip him, 
and to a degree it supplies the place of food. During the 
first four weeks of its administration, the appetite of the 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 59 

patient will ordinarily fail. This is the time when flesh is 
lost. The reorganization of tissue which is going on in the 
human body proceeds so much more rapidly as the opium 
is withdrawn that elimination is accomplished faster than 
substitution. This is not the system of rapid reduction. 
The patient takes his last dose of morphia, or opium, or 
cocaine, or chloral, before he begins his treatment. The 
remedy sustains the system to such an extent that the phy- 
sician in the case last quoted carried his morphia powders 
in his pocket during his entire time of treatment. Be- 
cause of a failing appetite, the elimination of nerve tissue 
and of all tissue from the human system goes on with in- 
creased rapidity, and hence for a time the patients lose 
flesh; but there is no appreciable loss of strength, for in- 
structions in diet and exercise are so minutely given that, 
if followed with anything like faithfulness, the system is 
supported and sustained during the weeks of treatment. 
Upon the cessation of the treatment the appetite returns 
with not only normal but almost abnormal intensity, and 
flesh is regained faster than it was lost. 

Opium is a very peculiar drug in this respect, among 
others, that while writing its autograph of wreck deeply 
into the heart of the system while it is taken into it, upon 
the withdrawal of the drug and its elimination from the 
system all normal processes of the physical organism re- 
sume their operation with all their pristine power. The 
system seems to bound up from its long time of bondage 
like a rubber ball. The countenance assumes a different 
hue. Ten to fifteen years seem to be rolled right off the 
patient's appearance. He looks young again, fresh and 
bright as in the happier days which lie the other side of 
his enshrouded past. The remedy guards the avenues of 



60 SHADO WS LIFTED. 

the system in such a way that the forces of lassitude, in- 
somnia, lack of nerve power, and all those many symptoms 
of suffering, are not able to find their way to shoot into it 
their arrows of pain. And the treatment has been now so 
perfected that no complication can arise along the course 
of treatment, unless it results from some organic lesion 
totally beyond the power of medicine or surgery to con- 
trol at all, that the remedy cannot meet and overcome. 
It leaves the patient, not merely a fragment of a man, 
simply not using morphine, with the long, long, dreary way 
before him before his thought can be concentrated or his 
mental powers focused upon any form of life effort, and with 
a body too weak for exertion and yet too nervous and full 
of unrest for repose, but it gives the man back himself, 
with all the deleterious effects of the drug removed from 
his system and scattered along the path behind him to vex 
and trouble him no more. He goes out into the world 
again, not because he is forced into it, but because he 
wishes to go. Life's interests again meet his gaze and he 
looks them triumphantly in the face. The bells that had 
so long tolled in the steeple of his despair lose their jan- 
gling discord, and the music that comes forth from them 
seems as though it came from throats of gold. This is 
what the Bellinger opium cure will do for every opium 
eater on earth, speedily, easily and triumphantly. 



THE COCAINE HABIT. 



"That way madness lies." — King Lear. 

"Have we eaten of the insane root?"— Macbeth. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE COCAINE HABIT. 

When a man takes up the last edition of the Pharma- 
copoeia or the Dispensatory, he finds some agents there that 
were known to Hippocrates. There are drugs along the 
columns of those voluminous works that have been known 
since pain and disease walked with sinister step into the 
circumference of human life, and there are others that are 
the children of the recent yesterdays. Among this latter 
class is the drug cocaine, the alkaloid, the active princi- 
ple of the erythroxylon plant, this new drug which, to- 
gether with its first cousin, chloral, was recently called by 
a prominent German specialist, crystallized hell. The 
home of the plant from which cocaine is derived is in 
South America. The natives there chew its leaves for the 
purpose of a strong tonic to the entire system. By its aid 
they will go for da}\s without food, held up by the strong 
toning power of the coca plant. It is not many years 
since that this new drug, the alkaloid of the coca plant. 
was introduced into medical science under the name of 
cocaine. Like some of the other products of modern 
chemistry, it was supposed at first that we had found a 
panacea for many obstinate human ills. It was at first 
deemed that we had in this alkaloid a remedy and cure for 
the opium disease, and many were the experiments made 
along in this direction— experiments which resulted too 
frequently in intensifying and adding a new element to 
the sufferings of the already burdened opium eater, by in- 
troducing him to this new border land of pain. As used 



64 SHADO WS LIFTED. 

for such purposes, medical science has discarded it, but 
for the purpose of a local anaesthetic that destroys the 
sensibility of the cutaneous nerves, that permits of the 
performance of minor surgical operations without pain, 
that renders it possible to introduce a knife into the center 
of the human eye without producing the slightest suffer- 
ing, it has its place to-day. 

EFFECTS. 

Cocaine somewhat resembles its sister drug, morphia, 
and in many respects it differs from it. The first touch 
of the cocaine exhilaration is somewhat similar in kind to 
that of the embrace of morphia. Thrown into the system 
not accustomed to its use, its first effect is that of a pleas- 
ant exhilaration, somewhat similar to that produced by 
three or four glasses of champagne. The life current is 
somewhat quickened in its movement. A warm, pleasur- 
able exhilaration pervades the entire system. The nerves 
are steadied. The mental activities take on a new, rich 
glow. But of all the dissolving views produced by the 
earlier stages of these drugs that enslave, that of cocaine 
dissolves the soonest. Opium in its earlier effects holds 
the mind of the man into whose system it has gone in a 
steady, equable calm that lasts for hours. With cocaine, 
however, especially when introduced into the system hy- 
podermically, its presence is felt instantly, but it fades 
away like the shifting pageant of a dream. Twenty min- 
utes to half an hour is sufficient for this subtle drug to 
enter the system, produce its results and fade away. It 
has this farther peculiarity in its mode of action, that, 
while opium leaves the system gradually, so far as its 
specific influences are perceived, cocaine passes out of the 
system with almost the suddenness of a lightning stroke. 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 65 

Not quicker does the electric current leave the system when 
the sponges are withdrawn, than does cocaine instantly drop 
the man who has been the recipient of its power from the 
perception of its effects into the reaction that touches him 
so suddenly. The effect of opium is to produce a tran- 
quillity that, once established, like a fully risen tide, the 
mark of the waters remains in the same place. Cocaine 
mounts to the brain almost with the rapidity of the blood 
circulation itself. It leaves it with equal celerity. The 
pleasures of alcohol are constantly mounting and tending 
to a climax. Those of opium are steady, those of cocaine 
are intense but evanescent. The specific effects of this 
drug, taken into the system, vary also very considerably 
from those of opium. The man who takes opium into his 
stomach rarely does so more than four or five times a day; 
the morphia habitue who uses a hypodermic syringe rarely 
thrusts the -injection under the skin more than six or eight 
times during the twenty-four hours; the cocaine habitue, 
in order to know anything like the continuous effects of 
the drug, must repeat his dose at least every half hour. 
Opium takes the nervous system in its grasp and holds it 
steadily quiet for hours at a time; cocaine puts a mirror 
before the soul, painted with every bright color, and then 
no sooner do you look at the beautiful landscape than it is 
withdrawn. It is a pure nerve stimulant, hence its sud- 
denness both of assault and of departure. The opium 
habitue may have a fairly steady hand and a reasonably 
steady head for years after his addiction; the cocaine user 
finds a complete and ever increasing lack of power to co- 
ordinate the muscles of the body, different sets of muscles 
seem to act independently of each other, the arms moving 
in different directions and the head in a different one still. 



66 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

One limb will be distorted with cramp, while the rest of 
the body seems free from it. 

Early in the initiation of the cocaine habitue come other 
specific influences which the drug contains. It has the 
power, more than any other drug of this entire class, with 
possibly the exception of hashish or Cannabis Indica, to 
produce hallucinations. The opium eater lives in a lotus 
land, and yet he is conscious who he is and what he is; the 
cocaine habitue lives in the midst of the unreal, of the 
illusionary. He hears strange voices talking around him, 
sometimes recognizing that they are the children of the 
drug, sometimes believing them to be actualities. It is 
said of the poet Goethe that he had the power to project 
at will a specter before his vision, that the specter would 
assume a chair opposite to that in which he himself was 
sitting, that with every appearance of being real the great 
poet was conscious all the while that it was a specter of his 
brain. The cocaine habitue repeats the experience of the 
German poet, with this distinction: Oftentimes he is not 
conscious of the visionary character of all the moving 
phantasmagoria that come and go within the circuit of his 
life. He hears the voices of well known friends the other 
side the door calling to him all night long. They sound 
real. For a time he thinks they are there. He will walk 
upon the street looking around the corner for unreal ac- 
quaintances to come to him, and yet, with any amount of 
disappointment at the visions of yesterday not materializ- 
ing into shape, his confidence is always renewed that the 
present visions shall be realized. 

I have known a case where a man for four years used 
cocaine alone, a very rare experience. Usually the two 
drugs are combined and the amount of opium largely 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 67 

increased to guard against the actions of cocaine. I have 
known a man to take this drug consecutively for four 
years. By all precedent and experience, he should have 
been in an insane asylum at least two years ago. We 
sometimes speak of a man living a dual life. We mean 
ordinarily that because of this reason or that he changes his 
plane of activity, but he himself is conscious of the change. 
It is done with deliberate intent and forethought. This 
gentleman that I mention was the liver of a dual life of a 
totally different kind. It was due, not to him, but to co- 
caine. He was sane by day; he was insane at night. By 
day he would attend to his business, meet his customers, 
carry on his occupation, seemingly a man of intelligence 
and balanced judgment; by night from the hour of the 
first dose of cocaine to the last one in the morning he lived 
a life in an unreal land filled with seeming realities that 
were always making promises to the ear and breaking 
them to the hope. 

SYMPTOMS. 

The appearance of the cocaine user is also different 
from that of the morphia habitue. The confirmed mor- 
phine fiend has the pasty complexion, the dull, gray-w T hite 
look as though his face were cut out of gray, whitish mar- 
ble. He has the look of helplessness and of despair so char- 
acteristic of that form of drug bondage. The appearance 
of the cocaine habitue is equally significant but different 
in kind. The opium eater's wildness of eye or general 
look of unreality, is because of a dullness of vision, because 
of a settled look of sullen indifference which covers his 
features like a pall. The cocaine habitue is a man whose 
eye is wild, the pupils dilated instead of contracted, and 
with a peculiar, haggard blueness of look, in the worst 



68 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

cases almost equaling the look of a man who has been 
cured of epilepsy by the use of nitrate of silver, 
making what is termed the blue man that we used to speak 
of in our childhood. The depression of the morphine 
user is a settled, habitual hopelessness. The cocaine hab- 
itue is constantly jumping from the height to the depth, 
only constantly jumping from a lower height and reaching 
a lower depth. A drug like this soon tears the mental fac- 
culties in tatters. The human brain or nervous system 
was never made to withstand such shocks, hence his career 
is far shorter than that of the morphia maniac, whose career 
often extends through the larger part of a lifetime. Co- 
caine sends its victims to shipwreck with all the engines in 
full blast. They reach the rocks very quickly. One feat- 
ure of this drug is its intense power to produce mental 
depression. The spiritual experiences into which cocaine 
will carry its votaries are so terrible that often the victim 
even shrinks from their description. His life slips away 
from him as the snow slips away from the earth when the 
April winds play upon it. His life is going fast and he 
knows it, but feels himself powerless to arrest the down- 
ward development. 

LITERATURE. 

The literature of this drug is very meager. Physi- 
cians have largely discarded it for every purpose except 
the one of producing local anesthetization. Its votaries 
are not so numerous as those of morphine, but the condi- 
tion into which they are carried with awful celerity is one 
pitiable to look upon. The cocaine habitue goes over his 
Niagara rapidly, and there is hardly a limit to the depth 
into which he descends. For power to produce concen- 
trated human misery, for power to squeeze out of life 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 69 

everything that makes life desirable, this drug, cocaine, 
stands solitary and peerless. 

PATHOLOGY. 

The pathology of cocaine, what it does to the interior 
nerve cells specifically, is comparatively little known. It 
seems to spend its power upon the terminal nerves and 
specially the intellectual and emotive faculties of the brain. 
It has this one ameliorating feature, it is not so very diffi- 
cult of cure. I have seen a cocaine habitue go into the 
office of our company for treatment with his hallucinations 
so fixed upon him that he could not sit in the chair with- 
out looking around to see if there was some face by his 
side or in the rear, who was not able to converse with the 
physician who talked with him until he had first, with the 
cocaine suspicion fast upon him, whispered in the physi- 
cian's ear, u You had better lock the doors.*' It seemed 
as though this man's life were so shattered that it were as 
impossible to pick its fragments up and put them together 
as those of the body of a man flung into the air, mangled 
into a thousand pieces, by the stroke of a locomotive going 
at full speed, and yet I have seen this same man, within 
the period of four weeks, regain his normal health, pass 
into a condition of cheery brightness of mind, conduct his 
business with all his old-time intelligence and acuteness, 
and in the short period of thirty days pass from the con- 
dition of a man who had not one single faculty seemingly 
intact against the terrible inroads of this drug, clothed in 
his right mind and all the faculties of his life in normal 
and harmonious action. No cocaine habitue need despair 
of relief, with far less suffering, with much less time nec- 
essary than would be required of the victims of most other 
forms of drug slavery. The cocaine seems to pass away out 



70 SHADOWS .LIFTED] 

of his system, leaving no trace behind. The Bellinger cure 
seems to take hold of the cocaine wreckage of body and 
mind from the very first moment of its entrance to the 
system. The man feels stronger, better, feeling day by 
day his faculties coming back at its beneficent request, 
and within the limit of a few short weeks, so far as can 
be judged by his appearance, his sensations and his testi- 
mony, his old cocaine bondage, with its terrific train of 
symptoms, seems to have folded its tent like the Arabs and 
have stolen out of his life, passing away from his experi- 
ence like the fancies of a troubled dream. 



THE CHLORAL HABIT. 



"I have lost the immortal part of myself." — Othello. 

" Hath into monstrous habits put the graces that once were 
his." — Henry VIII. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE CHLORAL HABIT. 

Among all the drugs to which the attention of the med- 
ical profession has been directed in recent years there has 
perhaps been none that promised so much and from whose 
use so much was anticipated, and which has so rapidly lost 
ground and is passing into kt innocuous desuetude," as the 
hydrate of chloral. It was supposed that the long search 
of years for a perfect hypnotic and sedative, which would 
successfully woo the goddess sleep to come into close con- 
tact with the wakeful sufferer, which should by its touch 
charm away care and pain, had been successful; but noth- 
ing, perhaps, promised more or has accomplished less than 
this much lauded agent. A hypnotic and pure nervous 
sedative that should rapidly and easily accomplish its mis- 
sion and yet carry in its wake no reaction, whose use should 
be attended without harm, which should give a sound 
night's sleep with no headache in the morning, which should 
have no deleterious action upon any of the vital centers, 
such an aid would indeed be a boon to humanity. 

How often do we walk down Wall street or State 
street, how often do we go into court and in the face of 
the judge upon the bench or the lawyer who pleads at the 
bar, how often when we attend a congress or meeting of 
men eminent in their professions to-day, of any class or 
kind, do we perceive the tendency to locomotor ataxia, 
to nervous prostration, to that chronic and constant weari- 
ness which is something far more and far different from 
healthy fatigue, which tells the story of wakeful nights. 



74 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

of cares that dog their tired lives perpetually, written 
with the sad pen of failing vitality into the countenances 
of men who ought to be merely at the summit of life's pil- 
grimage instead of far down its descending slope. It is to 
this class of men that drugs like the deadly chloral came 
with their wooing words of promise. Sleep "knits up 
the raveled sleeve of care"; but with sleep which instead 
of any such delightful processes in the lives of such men, 
leaves the raveled sleeve of care just as raveled at six 
o'clock in the morning as it was at ten o'clock at night, 
little is it to be wondered at that they long for something 
that would send them somewhere beyond the consciousness 
of their nightly weariness, were it only possible that some- 
thing to find. Hence the perfect hypnotic, the harmless 
sedative has been the boon of boons that the skilled chem- 
ist and nervous specialist has been for years seeking so 
diligently in the hope of its discovery. [jWhen hydrate of 
chloral was first known, it seemed as though this long 
search was ended. In this drug we have indeed an agent 
that does knit up the raveled sleeve of care, but the dan- 
ger is that it shall knit up also the man's life at the same 
time, that when the sleeve is unraveled again the life itself 
shall be pulled apart] 

SYMPTOMS. 

iJWell does the writer remember the enthusiasm, 
amounting almost to rapture, with which the discovery of 
this drug was hailed. It is so prompt, so speedy, so 
certain in its action, that the medical profession with joy 
believed that the great sleep controller was at last within 
their grasp. It had not been used long before the enthu- 
siasm faded away into disappointment, and the rapture 
gave place to anxiety. This drug was found to be a thing 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 



IO 



dangerous to handle. Its sedative action was perfect in- 
deed, but its action upon the heart rendered it something 
that must be used with great care, and the oft repeated 
accidents, that passed under the name of heart failure, 
during the earlier years of the use of this drug, bore wit- 
ness to its deadly efficiency as well as its therapeutic po- 
tency. It is possible to estimate with fair accuracy about 
what opium will do. Unless there is some marked idi- 
osyncrasy, which usually can be estimated beforehand, 
the wise practitioner can judge with large degree of cer- 
tainty just what he can do with the drag opium. But this 
subtle, insidious agent produces results which it is not al- 
ways possible to estimate beforehand, and which have so 
many dangerous features that the physician who uses it 
extensively is never free from a certain amount of ap- 
prehension. He must combat its sedative action by stim- 
ulants that mast get in their work before the deadly seda- 
tive can take full hold of the cardiac centers. Like its 
cousin and compeer, the equally efficient but equally 
deadly chloroform, it will, by one touch of its deadly 
finger, quench the life springs before danger is apparent 
at all. 

MODE OF ACTION. 

In the chloral habitue we have a different man from 
the opium eater or the cocaine fiend. The opium eater is 
buoyed up and then sails along on the surface of a fairly 
placid sea: the cocaine eater goes into, the air like a sky- 
rocket, and comes down about as suddenly, and the light 
is out of the rocket bef ore it strikes the earth ; the man in 
the chloral habit is simply happily stupid. His- hallucin- 
ations, if he has them, do not possess the intensity of 
reality subjectively to those that come to man from cocaine. 



76 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

His reverie is not even of the active character of the earlier 
stages of morphia. He sinks into the arms of a compan- 
ion that soothes but does not oppress, and the soft, gently 
waving fan of passive, not active, ecstasy is sweetly waved 
before the activities of his life. The opium eater becomes 
a man oppressed and surrounded with an iron hopeless- 
ness; the cocaine habitue becomes in time a wildly inco- 
herent maniac; the chloral votary gently descends, but 
certainly, the steps toward imbecility. u Facilis de- 
scensus ' is more completely true of his descent than of 
any of the others?! The opium eater takes the steps down- 
ward realizing ^where he is going; the cocaine fiend 
marches down the same incline, and part of the time, at 
least, he does not much care whither the steps lead; the 
devotee of chloral walks along the descending pathway, 
and the stairs are so softly carpeted that his footfall is in- 
audible even to himself, and he walks along so gently that 
his face is covered with a meaningless and imbecile smile 
even when he has nearly reached the portal of the chloral 
disciples' hell. Not long since, the writer followed along 
the course of a chloral habitue's experience, whose ex- 
perience was quite a typical one. This patient had used 
the three drugs in combination, or which everone of the 
three he could most easily secure at the time; often all three 
together, using chloral to the extent of producing its pe- 
culiar manifestations. There was present upon his coun- 
tenance something of the hopelessness of the opium eater, 
a degree of the wildness of the cocaine user, and, in addi- 
tion, that which is peculiarly the possession of the chloral 
habitue, that half idiotic smile, that vacancy of expression 
which is unaware of its own meanin^lessness, and which 
makes the physician instantly say as he looks upon him, 



SHABO WS LIFTED. 77 

' ' You have come too late. There is not mind or brain 
enough left in your organization to do anything with at 
all. ' ' (in its completeness of action the drug chloral steals 
away the brains of its votaries with more entireness, per- 
haps, than any of the others of the category. Opium, 
with ironical generosity, leaves enough of the mental 
equipment of its disciple to give him at least conscience 
enough to lend an edge to his remorse; nor is his con- 
sciousness of the outer world without or the subjective 
world within so disturbed that life is largely a blank. The 
bridge between his inner and outer world is indeed painted 
black, but the bridge is there. Cocaine throws its devotee 
from one kind of life to another so rapidly that he neither 
known nor cares whether there is any bridge at all. 
Chloral smothers the working of the whole mental ma- 
chinery under its downy pillows of intellectual nonentity. 
To look upon from without, a chloral habitue is a misera- 
ble specimen of a man; viewed from his experience within, 
his life, and perhaps his death, are free from many of 
those tormenting features that constitute the later forms 
of agony, by means of which opium stretches its victim 
upon its final racks. Here again, however, we are met by 
something of a similar paradox to that which greets us, 
indeed, along the whole line of these enslaving drugs and 
their action.] 

POSSIBILITIES OF CURE. 

No matter how badly wrecked the system may be, no 
matter how much the waters may have seemingly been 
drawn away from the foundations of life's holiest and 
deepest energies, provided no organic disease lurks behind 
the drug action in itself, remove the cause and you can 
with almost complete effect rejuvenate the man. The 



78 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

chloral habitue's friends need not despair of him; the 
chloral eater himself rarely despairs of himself, because 
he has not brain enough left to produce the emotion of 
despair or anything else. The chloral habit, while deadly 
so long as it lasts, is far more susceptible of cure than the 
opium habit, and somewhat more so than that of cocaine. 
Under the Bellinger treatment, no case of chloral addic- 
tion, no matter to what extent it may have been carried, 
unless the entire structure of the nervous organism has 
been completely changed, need take more than a few weeks 
to cure. With marvelous celerity, the remedy attacks the 
manifestations caused by the drug and the peculiar action 
of the drug itself, and the drooling imbecile or seeming idiot 
of the first few days of treatment soon becomes again the 
bright-eyed, intelligent-looking man that he was in his day 
of pristine health and vigor. More rapidly do the symp- 
toms caused by the poison disappear than in perhaps any 
one of the others of these deadly drugs. This is such a 
fugitive acting agent, so passing in its effect, that the 
treatment takes it in its grip so strongly and beneficently 
that in a very, very short period the chloral dream fades 
out of his life and he is disturbed by this dark mirage of 
the soul no longer. With weakness changing into strength, 
with imbecility passing into intelligence, with the whole 
category of repulsive symptoms stealing out of a man's 
life as the hyena deserts a battle field upon the approach of 
man, in like manner are chloral and all its deadly work 
driven out of its home among the chambers of men's 
mental organization and the breezes of renewed and gen- 
erous life sweep once more through all its corridors. 



THE HASHISH HABIT. 



"This is mere madness, and thus awhile the fit will work 
on him." — Hamlet. 

" I wonder he's so simple to trust the mockery of unquiet 
slumbers." — Bichard III. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE HASHISH HABIT. 

This weird and mysterious intoxicant until very re- 
cently was little known in the United States. Its home 
was in the Orient, and the temperament of the east seemed 
necessary in order to be the recipient of its peculiar and 
specific effect. Cannabis Indica, or Indian hemp, is a 
drug whose unique and peculiar features are, even to-day, 
imperfectly apprehended. More even than is the case 
with the hydrate of chloral, are its effects unstable, un- 
certain, fugitive, remote, difficult to be grasped in some 
of their features. Of this drug more interrogation points 
may be used, or around it may be massed than any other 
drug known, perhaps, in all the list of agents of this class. 
The hashish intoxication is, by its votaries, considered 
the divinest thing that earth contains. Dumas in Monte 
Cristo, Bayard Taylor in his well known article of thirty 
years ago or more, have made the effects of this drug 
known to the reading public of to-day. The opium joint 
is spreading all over the country, the manufacture of the 
hypodermic syringe is steadily increasing every year, the 
sale of cocaine, not to the medical profession, but to its 
habitues, is something that goes on augmenting from 
decade to decade; but, while the hashish joint is not 
unknown, its votaries are comparatively few in America. 

FEATURES. 

This drug, in some of its features, more resembles the 
action of cocaine than any of the others with which this 
world has yet had to do. Some of its effects are very 



82 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

similar to those of cocaine itself; others are almost diamet- 
rically opposed to it. The sensations of each are in a 
degree similar, but, while cocaine mounts to the brain 
with intense rapidity and evaporates like a summer cloud, 
hashish seems to remain latent in the system, producing 
absolutely no effect at all, so far as the user can discern 
himself or as to any manifestation of effect that can be 
discerned upon him. Then, having once taken hold upon 
the system, its effects are nearly as permanent as to the 
time of the effects of a single dose as those of opium. 
This drug seems to be a direct nervous stimulant. It dif- 
fers very materially in its results upon different tempera- 
ments, but upon most organizations its effects are limited 
to its stimulant action, its hypnotic or sedative properties 
being, in very many actions, hardly visible at all. The 
hashish votary lives in a dreamland, whose colors are not 
somber like those of opium, or wild and neutral like those of 
chloral, or evanescent like those of cocaine, bat the interior 
firmament, the whole sky of the man is lit up with lurid 
colors. The phantasmagoria of his fancies gleam and burn 
with a blaze of all the colors of heaven, often passing into 
the more lurid ones of hell. The clouds in the sky of the 
hashish eater's mind have no silver lining, but their edges 
and center are painted with flashing scarlet and deep, full 
crimson. 

I An experience that once occurred to the writer him- 
self gives, perhaps, as vivid an idea as can be given of the 
properties of this drug. Once, while passing down the 
leading business street in Baltimore, I saw upon a sign 
above my head, < ' Gungawalla Candy, Hashish Candy. ' ' I 
purchased a box of the candy and, while waiting with two 
or three medical friends at the Eutaw House in Baltimore, 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 83 

determined that I would by experiment upon myself test 
the power of this drug. I took a full dose at 11 o'clock 
in the forenoon. For a period of three hours no effect 
was discerned at all. Upon going in to dinner the drug 
took hold of the system and manifested its peculiar witch- 
ery with scarcely prelude or warning. I remarked to the 
friends sitting by me at the table, "It is undoubtedly 
here a day of jubilee or of something in the way of cele- 
bration. You perceive that the tables are set with golden 
plate, that the waiters all seem to be dressed in velvet 
costumes, and that hundreds of canary birds are singing 
in gilded cages. It must be a celebration of a good deal 
of magnitude, as the many bands of martial and orchestral 
music seem all to be playing at once." A double con- 
sciousness seemed established. I seemed to be sitting at 
the table with friends, and yet to be somewhere else. I 
remarked to a friend as I took a glass of water in my hand, 
"Singular, that seems to be the hand of somebody else." 
The glass of water could be raised to the lips, showing 
that the connection between the brain and the motor nerves 
was not severed or discontinued, bat the hand that raised 
the glass of water seemed to belong to the body of some 
one else. At the conclusion of the meal I remarked that 
it would be necessary for them to send in servants with a 
Sedan chair, that it would be impossible for them or for 
me to traverse that enormous distance without frequent 
spells of resting. The sense of disturbance and infinite 
extension of time which conies to the morphine habitue 
upon the attempt at abandonment of his drug, reversing 
the shortening of the hours that were given to him as one 
of the gifts in the heart of the deadly poppy, that sense 
of extension of time, so tormenting then, was met while 



84 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

under the thraldom of hashish, only, instead of being in- 
tensely disagreeable, it was thrillingly pleasant. Space 
also seemed extended in all ways. The distance across of the 
room seemed, instead of steps, to be miles. Everything 
was transfigured, but, in these earlier stages, transfigured 
in the way of glorification. Then, without cause or rea- 
son, occurred a long fit of laughter. There seemed a per- 
ception of the ludicrous, but upon what that perception rested 
it was impossible to say. As time passed on, these earlier 
symptoms were interspersed with others that were fearful 
in their suggestiveness. While the consciousness of iden- 
tity remained and the realization of connection with the out- 
side world was not lost, there came an appalling apprehen- 
sion of impending death. Some cold, grisly specter, unseen 
but felt, seemed coming more and more steadily toward 
the vital centers of life. This, too, gradually passed 
away and was succeeded by several hours of dreamless and 
refreshing slumber. During the next two or three days, 
the only result noticeable was an occasional twinge of the 
nerves, similar to that which would be produced by the 
sudden application of a powerful electric battery, a pang 
of darting pain, intense but evanescent, and these symp- 
toms as they disappeared, became merged into the normal 
actions of life. 

This isolated experience gives a glimpse of the way in 
which this mighty drug destroys its devotees. The ner- 
vous system of the hashish eater soon yields to the intense 
assaults upon the nervous centers. Paralysis, a complete 
wreckage of the power of nervous co-ordination and 
of that self-poise which enables the man to meet the 
emergencies and calls of life, are so interfered with that 
the votary of hashish soon finds his place absent among 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 85 

the tasks and duties of life. Far more rapidly than opium, 
with almost the celerity of cocaine, with nothing like the 
soothing effect of chloral, the hashish eater rushes onward 
to his doom. His aching and tormented nerves find no 
method or haven of relief but in repeated doses of the 
same subtle poison. 

In the comparatively few cases with which we are 
called upon to deal, the Bellinger remedy reinstates the ship- 
wrecked votary of Cannabis Indica. It takes a some- 
what longer time to restore the exhausted nervous system 
of the hashish eater to its normal condition, but the re- 
sults are equally certain. In this, as in all other forms of 
enslavement from the bondage producing drugs, the cure 
is only a matter of time. Let the votary of hashish be 
brought under the dominion of the Bellinger cure, and 
neither his trembling limbs, his shaking hands or his ex- 
hausted reservoir of nervous vitality will long stand in the 
way of his complete rehabilitation. 



NERVOUS PROSTRATION— ITS CAUSES, ITS 
MANIFESTATIONS, ITS CURE. 



"Sick now, droop now; this sickness doth infect the very 
life blood of our enterprise."— Henry IV. 

"His siege is now against the mind, the which he pricks 
and wounds with many legions of strange fantasies. — King John. 



CHAPTER VI. 

NERVOUS PROSTRATION ITS CAUSES, ITS MANIFESTATIONS 

ITS CURE. 



In classic story the statue of Janus was said to have 
two faces. So some words that from constant iteration 
have become familiar to our ears have not two faces 
merely, but many. Two such words are they which head 
this chapter. Nervous prostration. What is it ? That 
were a question not so far removed from the inquiry, What 
is a rose? There are many kinds of roses; there are di- 
verse and manifold answers to this significant question. 
Nervous prostration ! Does that mean the lassitude and 
the languor which meet and are part of the daily life of 
the man whose vital expenditure has exceeded his vital in- 
come ? Nervous prostration ! Does that mean the man 
and the man's condition who wooes through many nights 
the goddess sleep in vain ? Nervous prostration ! Does 
that mean the man whose wonted powers, whose usual 
easy yet firm grasp upon the business of his life suddenly 
falter, who finds his head confused while adding up the 
column of figures along which his eye and mind used to 
run as easily as the boy who runs along the well known 
path across the fields ? Does it mean the failure of appe- 
tite, the distaste for exertion, the longing for that repose 
either of body or of mind which he finds it well nigh im- 
possible to obtain ? Does it mean that sudden access of 
irritability of disposition, of variableness of temper, of 
outbreak of spleen in the man whose serene habit and well 
poised conduct had long made him the admiration, if not 



90 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

the envy, of his friends ? Does it mean those subtle or 
more occult symptoms that make him wonder with a 
chill of apprehension what is coming next ? Does it mean 
that total revolution of the preferences and motives of 
life, which change the man so thoroughly that you almost 
find yourselves wishing that he had passed from earth the 
friend you knew and loved of other days ? Does it mean 
that sudden halt to all the powers of life, when the strong 
man drops upon the floor of his office or his study and is 
unconscious for minutes or for hours? It includes all 
these, and a long category of other symptoms and exhibi- 
tions of its presence which, were they enumerated ever so 
carefully, would leave others in the catalogue still un- 
classified. 

Nervous prostration, like heart failure, is a word 
which, like that other word, charity, covereth not a mul- 
titude of sins, but a multitude of ills, of infirmities, of 
weird and many-sided exhibitions of some change that 
has gone deep into the heart of man's life and experience. 
It is a word that in modern life meets you well nigh every 
day. Your friend of the ruddy cheek, of the firm grasp 
of hand, of the quick-coming smile, of the sure, accurate 
judgment, meets you with pallid face and shaking fingers, 
with a woe-begone expression of countenance, with hag- 
gard eye and cheek. What is the matter ? Nervous pros- 
tration. The mother whose well ordered household, whose 
bright-eyed family move the admiration of all who come 
into that pleasant family circle grows careless in her home, 
unresponsive even to the touch of the baby fingers that 
once were the plectrum that played upon the strings of her 
heart as the fingers of the night wind touch those of 
the Eolian harp. What does all this mean? Nervous 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 91 

prostration. The banker or man of large affairs, who 
has handled large issues as the quick witted school boy 
handles his daily task, grows timorous, loses touch upon 
the great business world which he used to look in the face 
with a smile of confidence. The affairs of the bank be- 
come tangled, investments are made which show a terrible 
want of judgment, if not an absolute incomprehension to 
realize the ups and downs of the financial world. What is 
the explanation of it all? Nervous prostration. The 
minister in his pulpit, the trustee in his pew, the church 
officer in his holy duty of Christian activity, the chaste 
woman, the tablets of whose soul were like the crystal 
ice or the placid water, shows a deterioration of spirit, a 
change of moral character, hating what once was loved, 
loving what once was hated, sometimes conscious of the 
change, crying out as did the great apostle of old, " Who 
shall deliver me from the body of this death?" With 
blanched faces and faltering accents friends raise the sad 
inquiry: ''Where does it all portend? What is its fearful 
significance ?" Again the sad reply, nervous prostration. 
Along this line of weary interrogation the questions to be 
raised, the answers that could be given, seemingly almost 
endless, and again and again the one pertinent but terrible 
answer: Nervous prostration. 

The skilled specialist goes back to the distant past, 
looks through the ever extending present, studies with 
ceaseless vigilance the human system in all its possible 
modes of abnormal combination to find means to take the 
sadness out of this question and answer, that, linked to- 
gether, form a fetter that manacles the fairest develop- 
ments of the human life, to see if something of the sound 
dirge and of despair can be taken from these two words 



92 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

that specialist and physician, that society itself, have come 
so to dread, these two words, nervous prostration. All 
the resources of experience, all the possibilities of science, 
have been epitomized, gathered together: Sanitarium, 
rest cure, mind cure, faith cure, prayer cure, every- 
thing that promised relief or offered consolation to 
this ceaseless interrogatory has been called into play to 
lighten the burden of darkness contained in these two 
words, nervous prostration. The pathologist seeks to find 
the structural change either of nerve cell or of fiber in 
whose hidden recesses the causes of these two words are 
found to dwell, searching with microscope and with stetho- 
scope and with every thing' that enables us to read the se- 
crets of the human body, to see if these two words can be 
driven from their menacing attitude toward the brightest 
and the best that the civilization of to-day produced and 
contained. A perfect cure for nervous prostration must 
depend on what science reveals to us respecting its cause. 
If it be change in one way or another of that subtle thing 
we term the nervous system, what is that thing, in what 
way is the nervous current impeded or deflected, in what 
manner is the nervous system itself thrown into abnormal 
action or changed in interior construction ? 

Here again we need not close this chapter by leaving 
an interrogation point only as its last word. With the 
protean forms of this manifold disease, the Bellinger cure 
has successfully grappled. With all those exhibitions of 
shattered energy, of want of power, out of which spring 
those symptoms that the thousands of sufferers have 
learned so to dread, this potent yet gentle remedy suc- 
cessfully grapples. Taking the springs of nervous action 
as the beginning of its beneficent working, it constantly 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 93 

holds them in its open hand of relief. The nervous suf- 
ferer, who cannot rise in the morning without dropping a 
tear upon the wearied pillow that has known so few hours 
of slumber, who looks out with affrighted face upon the 
duties and tasks of the day, the strong man who bursts 
into tears attempting to tie his necktie, the delicate wo- 
man who can scarcely find energy to arise to greet her 
husband's bright welcome to the new born morning or the 
little prattler's broken words of love, finds in this potent 
ally a sure and effectual relief, and among all its paths of 
beneficent progress there is none that promises a surer 
and sweeter consolation than its power to assuage this 
latest form of the developments and resultants of civilized 
life. To all nervous sufferers this peerless remedy stands 
w T ith face of invitation, with hands extended in invitation 
of mercy, making no promises that it does not fulfill, but 
bidding them bid farewell to all that hath vexed and har- 
assed their wearied lives. 



OPIUM SMOKING. 



^ I would not spend another such a night though 'twere to 
buy a world of happy days.'* — Richard III. 



CHAPTER VIL 

OPIUM SMOKING. 

Were this volume to be read merely by those victims 
of the drug disease who dwell upon the Atlantic coast, this 
chapter would almost be one of supererogation. The 
opium joint, although familiar to Boston, to New York 
and to our eastern cities, is, however, not met with with the 
openness and the frequency, and it does not number its 
votaries by the scores and hundreds as in the cities of the 
Pacific coast or the metropolitan centers of the west. 

The opium den, as it is called (and rightly), is not an 
attractive place for one whose senses are not lulled into 
almost cessation of action by the fumes of the drug, any 
more than the subject is a specially delightful one to any 
but those who with eagerness are looking for release, and 
who find by its perusal that they may secure it. Your 
opium smoker is a peculiar product of modern humanity. 
The man who uses morphine hypodermically takes his 
syringe from his pocket, throws the solution Magendie 
into his arm, puts away his syringe and goes about his 
business again; the man w r ho takes laudanum, morphia, 
or any one form or other of the drug opium itself, takes 
his dose with more or less frequency and spends upon it 
but a few moments of time; the opium smoker, however, 
must make a business of it; he must be content to spend long 
hours, either of the day or night, or both, in seeking that 
effect which the hypodermic syringe or the slower vehicle 
of the stomach gives in a comparatively short time. An 
opium den is a strange place. Upon a log in mid stream, 



98 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

where the waters of the river have suddenly flooded the 
country, you will sometimes see a black man and a white 
man, a dog and a cat, even a wild beast, a leopard or a 
panther, all riding together upon their slender raft of 
safety, and looking, if not amicably, at least without ma- 
lignancy into each other's eyes. The opium den brings 
about results not so very dissimilar. Here, the cultured 
woman of society, the opium smoker par excellence, whose 
system is as saturated as his pipe, the Chinaman, the 
laborer and 'longshoreman, the young man in society, all 
herd in nerveless companionship together. The pipe is the 
only thing that seems to be an object very much worthy 
their attention. You will often, in an opium joint, find 
yourself in a place where you could buy the entire furni- 
ture for $2.50 and then find that you had expended $2 too 
much in your purchase, but oftentimes you will find, in 
this strangely assorted room, one or more of the opium 
smokers inhaling the drug through a pipe worth $100. By 
some strange satire upon society, if not humanity, most of 
these opium joints, or a large proportion of them, are kept 
by Chinamen. Our modern ideals of treaty obligation, 
which wished to scrutinize with so much more intentness 
of scrutiny that which comes from the west than the east, 
lest they should bring us harm, are met by the somewhat 
ironical fact that the sons and daughters of American cul- 
ture find the servants who gratify their hours of solace 
with the opium pipe in the willing services of the China- 
man. 

The opium used in these so-called places of pleasure is 
by no means the opium that you buy at the drug store. It 
must be cooked, and the cooking of opium is narcotic high 
art, just the right degree of consistency that it may be 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 99 

wrapped deftly and rapidly around the long needle at whose 
point it is held and submitted to the flame of the little lamp 
which consumes its more volatile portions, leaving them to 
pass along the yellow avenue of the pipe and into the per- 
haps nearly as yellow structure of the bronchial tubes and 
pulmonary cells of the opium votary, leaving the product, 
Yen She, to be again used by the opium lovers who can- 
not afford to use anything else. 

Opium smoking, for a man accustomed to the action of 
the hypodermic syringe, seems a slow mode of relief. One 
bright American young man who became addicted to this 
form of opium bondage told the writer that in order to 
get the relief which his dulled system found necessary, he 
was compelled to use forty long draws a day, and the forty 
long draws consumed the major portion of the twenty -four 
hours. Opium smoking produces a peculiar yellow pallor 
of complexion, somewhat different from that of the victims 
of other forms of addiction to this drug, and seems to 
produce a peculiar dulling of the faculties, which, if not 
different in kind, is somewhat different in degree from that 
experienced by those who use it in other forms. Other- 
wise, its effects upon the human system do not seem to 
differ very perceptibly from those of any other of its modes 
of access. 

So far as its cure is concerned, it is more amenable to 
treatment than almost any other form of addiction. Your 
opium smoker does not seem to be in the grasp of so re- 
lentless a grip of this peculiar demon, as a man who has 
used it for long years hypodermically. He may be a 
duller man when he begins treatment, but he ends it more 
quickly. The Bellinger cure for opium smoking is as 
complete as for other forms of the drug, and he soon finds 



100 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

his pipe no longer necessary and can lay it away upon the 
shelf as a memento, if not a warning, of his old days of 
seeming pleasure and actual bondage. 



ILLUSTRATIVE CASES. 



"If he be credulous and trust my tale, I'll make him glad." 
Taming of the Shrew. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

ILLUSTRATIVE CASES. 

This chapter is intended to exhibit the action and illus- 
trate the mode of working of the drug habit as exhibited 
upon the temperament of different individuals. It is a 
great mistake to suppose that opium or any of these bond- 
age producing drugs affect all persons alike. The nervous 
temperament will exhibit most prominently a certain class 
of symptoms; the phlegmatic man will present others of a 
different kind. There is a sub-stratum of effect common to 
greater or less degree in them all, but these drugs have 
Protean forms of manifestation, and it is the aim of this 
chapter to exhibit, in this concrete and personified way, 
their action upon different human systems. 

Case No. 1. — This young man, Mr. S. , resided in 
Council Bluffs, Iowa, in the year 1886. He was taking 
morphia to the extent of fifteen grains a day hypodermi- 
cally. The period of his addiction extended over about four 
years. One evening, because of being witness to an assault, 
with which he was in no way personally connected, he was 
placed under arrest, and detained at the station house until 
morning that he might give his testimony in this case. The 
usual hour for his taking his evening dose was about nine 
o'clock. Never having before been placed in circumstances 
where he could not obtain it, he did not realize the condition 
that he was in until aloDg into the hours of the night. Upon 
the appearance of these symptoms of dread, he entreated 
the officers to send for Dr. Bellinger; but they, not wishing 
to take the trouble or not realizing the necessity of the 



104 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

case, put him off with some evasive reply and did not do 
so. Along toward the hours of early morning, a carriage 
whirled rapidly to the doctor's house with the peremptory 
message that he come at once to the jail. This young man, 
of magnificent physique, fine presence, in the stress of the 
opium agony, had violently hurled his face against the 
sharp corners of the iron bars of the cell, torn the flesh into 
fragments and was found in convulsions upon the floor. 
Dr. Bellinger, upon being sent for, gave him a large dose 
of morphia and bound up his wounds as best he could. In 
the morning, when daylight dawned and the activities of 
the day began, he called for a mirror, took one look at his 
disfigured and distorted countenance, realizing that it was 
mained for life, deliberately took a knife that happened to 
be in his possession, and with one stroke ended his earthly 
career. This case is given to illustrate the terrible stress 
of agony to which abstinence from opium will speedily re- 
duce the victim of the drug, and the terrible clangers inci- 
dent to one ignorant upon this subject having to deal with 
such a constitution in such a critical hour. 

Case No. 2. — This case also happened in Council 
Bluffs in tbe year 1888, in the experience of Dr. Bell- 
inger himself. This was a case in which large quantities 
of opium and whisky were consumed by the same indi- 
vidual, a somewhat rare combination, as the one drug 
usually so permeates the system that the other stimulant 
is neither required nor desired. In this case there were 
symptoms of actual mania. Dr. Bellinger entered the 
man's cell to endeavor to quiet the man's system and give 
him sleep. The man refused to take his medicine and 
grappled with the doctor himself in a grip that was for 
life or death. The jailor's wife, recognizing the condition 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 105 

of things, threw the door open and enabled the doctor for 
an instant to make his escape from the man's cell, until the 
efforts of three men had put manacles upon his wrists and 
prevented him doing farther harm. This case is illustra- 
tive of the actual aberration of faculty, of the actual pres- 
ence of distorted and disordered brain action that some- 
times make their appearance at the end of a ver}^ short 
period, even, of abstinence. 

Case No. 3 also occurred at Council Bluffs in the year 
1888. This was the case of a man actually cured of the 
habit, but from sheer lack of interest in life, the founda- 
tions of life's anticipations all for him seemingly run dry, 
he lapsed into the use of the drug to a certain extent, and 
there was developed a form of emotional insanity that 
resulted in several attempts at suicide. With diabolic 
cunning the man hid his morphia powders between the 
pillows of his bed, and upon the very first opportunity 
took them into his system. Then, endeavoring to act in 
his natural manner to deceive those around him, he said 
to the doctor when he arrived, "I think, doctor, I have 
got the better of you now. ',' Not many hours after the 
uttering of those words, death dropped the curtain. This 
case is illustrative of the way in which the drug will sap 
the foundations of all life's interests^ so that the sufferer 
no longer cares to retain existence that seems to him abso- 
lutely worthless. 

Illustration No. 4. — This illustration is given to in- 
clude several cases of the way in which the drug acts upon 
the temperaments of different men, so that, while taking 
similar doses and while being surrounded with conditions 
not very dissimilar in themselves these four or five men, 
who would differ in expression and in manner and in all 



106 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

exhibition of personality only to the extent that different 
men do so in this world made up of all forms of individ- 
uality, illustrates the different action of the drug, produc- 
ing results widely dissimilar. 

The first case is the exhibition of the absolute and to- 
tal wreck sometimes made by the drug and of its power 
to cause a man to steadily march, with accellerating step, 
the down-hill path of life. Mr. V. is the son of one of 
the most prominent statesmen of the southern states. He 
began the use of the drug when he was twenty years old. 
He had a fine education, a brain far above the average ca- 
pacity, at the threshold of life standing equipped for its 
duties with far more entireness of equipment than very many 
men of his age. He took the drug steadily for a period of 
seventeen years, the last of these years mounting up to the 
enormous dose of fifty or sixty grains per day, using with it 
part of the time large doses of alcohol as well. This young 
man was ostracized from his home, had not seen his father 
or his mother for the period of thirteen years, w 7 as de- 
serted by his wife and children, drifting from one north- 
ern city to another, losing hold upon one of life's incent- 
ives after another, until, at the age of thirty -seven years, 
he was found in one of the metropolitan cities of the east 
working nights as compositor in a printing office for the 
purpose of earning enough to keep body and soul together 
and to supply him with his enormous daily draughts of 
morphine and alcohol. Upon this man's face was w T ritten 
the alphabet of despair. His thoughts often turned to- 
ward the extinction of the life that seemed to him so ab- 
solutely worthless. Some writer has said that opium 
makes lawless people tame. This is true of some, per- 
haps many, people, but in instances like these it develops 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 107 

every form of lawlessness and degeneracy of nature. This 
case came under the notice of Dr. Bellinger and in seven 
weeks the man was free as the air he breathed. In this 
case there was exhibited very prominently and markedly 
one characteristic feature of the Bellinger treatment which, 
because of this, as well as of other characteristics which it 
possesses, renders it peerless and solitary. As this young 
man passed under treatment, the old, pure, long lost moral 
longings and moral characteristics of his bygone youth 
came back to him one by one as the mountain tops come 
back to the vision of the traveler when the sun lifts the 
mist clouds away. Everything that made him the man, 
that caused his friends and family to cover him with their 
mantle of affection in the bygone years of his youth, be- 
gan to stand out again, salient and visible. 

The next case illustrative of this power and feature of 
the drug bondage was of a character almost diverse from 
the foregoing. A prominent physician in the state of 
Massachusetts had used this drug for twenty-eight long 
years to an amount of about thirty grains per day. Dur- 
ing this long time he created and sustained a large, thriv- 
ing medical practice among the most cultured, respectable, 
Christian people of a surburban town. He was a man 
prominent in Masonic circles, a trustee and honored officer 
in a large Congregational church, a man respected and be- 
loved by all, of admitted professional skill, and in every 
way an honorable, Christian gentleman. This man, dur- 
ing all these years, was tortured by the pangs of con- 
science. He said to the writer of this volume that the sun 
never rose above his head in the morning that it did 
not seem to carry to him, to bring to his hopeless and 
shadowed life, some new admonition, some new, fresh 



108 SHADO WS LIFTED. 

word of self-reproach. This gentleman had retimed his 
professional standing, and surrounding him all these years, 



the guarding, saving influences of a cultured, Christian 
home, the unflagging and unfaltering love of a devoted 
wife; but conscience was all the time uttering her stern 
words of warning and of reproach. 

The third case in this catalogue of illustrative in- 
stances is typical of the action of opium and chloral to- 
gether upon the purely intellectual faculties of the mind. 
This was a bright } 7 oung man, also a physician, a gradu- 
ate of one of the leading medical colleges of the country, 
whose life did not exhibit the characteristics of low moral 
action of the young man from the south, who was not dis- 
turbed much by the stings of conscience, but whose drug 
experience seemed to expend itself most largely in oblit- 
erating the very intelligence of the man. When first 
coming under the notice of Dr. Bellinger there seemed 
to be little material left for the treatment to work upon. 
It seemed as though his very mind itself had evaporated 
like the morning dew. He stood and leered with idiotic 
smile as he endeavored to express, by meaningless, bab- 
bling words, a thought that had no coherence in its heart. 
The man was seemingly driven into absolute and entire 
mental imbecility. Within a few weeks the old bright- 
ness of the eye, the alert look of intelligence, the normal 
action of the mental faculties, all reasserted themselves. 

In case No. 4, Mr. S., of Connecticut, we find an 
instance where the combination of opium and cocaine had 
driven a man, not only away from family and friends, or 
driven them away from him, but in this instance, also that 
of a physician of standing and repute, the man seemed to 
have come to a dead standstill; a pause in all of life's 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 109 

activities. There was not the look of imbecility so marked 
upon the countenance of the last illustration, but a look 
of dull vacancy, as though the man had lost and never 
expected to find himself again. 

The next case, case 5, is a marked illustration of the 
peculiar and unique effects of cocaine when taken singly 
and alone. This is a very rare instance, such cases being 
remarkably uncommon. In all his large experience, run- 
ning up into the thousands, Dr. Bellinger himself stated 
to the writer that he had met but thirty or forty cases of 
this form. For four years this man used large quantities 
of cocaine hypodermically. He carried on during those 
four years an active, exhausting business that put no in- 
considerable strain upon the inventive faculties of the 
mind. During the day, to outward observation, he was 
virtually a sane man ; at night he was a man exhibiting all 
the traces of insanity. As soon as the cessation of busi- 
ness hours made it possible, he would go from his store to 
his home to begin his nightly experience with cocaine, 
taking it every half hour or less during the entire night, 
except during the very brief intervals in which nature 
gave him snatches of repose. He would spend the entire 
night often under the influence of hallucinations that were 
to him as vivid and real as any waking experience, hear- 
ing voices outside his door that seemed to his strained and 
tense nerves to possess all the characteristics of reality. 
When morning came, he would go to his place of business, 
and while himself often feeling that he was in an abnormal 
condition carry on his business in such a way that the keen 
eyes of those around him never noted but that the man 
was sane and normal. 



110 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

One interesting although ludicrous feature of this 
man's experience was an illustration of the power of this 
drug in the lower animals. This man had a pet cat who 
was very fond of him. This animal became the victim to 
the cocaine habituation almost as much as the man him- 
self. The moment that he would take his hypodermic 
injection of cocaine, the cat would instantly lick the 
place where the syringe had been inserted, and then en- 
deavor to lap the edges of the syringe itself. She would 
lie upon his breast close to his mouth, where she could in- 
hale his breath, and then would fall from the bed to the 
floor, exhibiting all the symptoms of cocaine intoxication. 
The animal, as well as the man, passed the night in this 
state of hallucination. She would look with glaring eye 
balls into vacancy and throw herself into a position indi- 
cating fear and terror, and upon being deprived of the 
drug would manifest the same or similar uneasiness as 
would the man himself. 

This experience was once repeated in different form by 
some friends of the writer himself. They threw a hypo- 
dermic injection into the neck of a dog for weeks, and the 
animal exhibited all the forms of the opium disease. He 
would come and beg, with all the canine's power of beg- 
ging, for the administration of the sedative drug, and 
upon receiving it would go and lie down and exhibit all the 
characteristics of the opium eater's dream. Upon being de- 
prived of the drug he would manifest the same symptoms 
of uneasiness and depression that the opium eater himself 
would exhibit under like conditions. 

Case 6 in this catalogue of illustrative cases is an ex- 
hibition of the power of small quantities of the drug to 
produce results on the system in some respects more difh- 



SHADOWS LIF1EB. Ill 

cult to overcome than those of much larger doses. This 
young man, Mr. T. , was a resident of one of the metro- 
politan cities of New England, who had been in the habit 
for some years of taking the comparatively small quantity 
of two grains of morphia per day hypodermically, taking 
it at brief intervals during the day in doses of a quarter 
or a fifth of a grain at a time. Any one reasoning with- 
out the experience which comes from long treatment of 
such cases would say that this young man's case would be 
a very easy one to treat. The young man from the south 
with his sixty grains per day, the physician w<ho had for 
twenty-eight years taken thirty grains per day, even the 
case of the gentleman using the combination of morphia 
and cocaine, or of morphia and chloral, all proved more 
amenable to treatment than this one case using these 
small quantities of the drug, the reason doubtless lying in 
the fact that instead of taking doses of sufficient quantity 
and pow r er to quench the action of the nervous system 
entirely and hold it in absolute quietude for a time, 
these small doses kept it in a continual condition of irri- 
tation which rendered it necessary to take a much longer 
time and use of every resource of skill with great ingenu- 
ity to effect his liberation. 

The question is often asked, ' ' What is the most diffi- 
cult and what the least difficult form, so far as treatment 
is concerned and the kind or features of inconvenience of 
liberation, in w 7 hich morphia or any of these drugs can be 
used?" The test of experience has pretty w T ell settled 
that, of all modes of habituation, the use of the hypoder- 
mic syringe produces results upon the system that are 
worse in character than any other mode of its use. The 
sudden, almost shock-like action of the drug when taken 



112 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

in this form, is more intense than when used, through the 
channels of mouth and stomach. The hypodermic habitue 
taking twenty grains of morphia per day for ten years is 
almost invariably a more difficult subject for treatment 
than a man who has used thirty grains by the stomach 
alone. Following the use of the hypodermic syringe, as 
to deleterious results, comes the use of morphia by the 
mouth, next the taking of gam opium or of laudanum 
by the stomach; fourth, the smoking of opium, and fifth, 
the use of Yen She, the residuum of the opium bowl when 
the opium smoker has exhausted his pipe. This black, 
powder-like-looking residuum is termed Yen She, and its 
use is largely confined to the Pacific slope. Taking this 
standard of difficulty and time, provided the system is 
free from complications of organic disease independent of 
and separate from the opium disease itself, the Bellinger 
treatment will cure, without pain or suffering, a typical 
case of hypodermic use of morphia in from four to six 
weeks, a case of morphia by the mouth in virtually the 
same time but possibly a little less, cases of opium by the 
mouth, laudanum or opium smoking, in from three to five 
weeks, and cases of Yen She habit in from three to four 
weeks. Contrary to impression, patients using morphia 
and cocaine together, while experiencing a worse wreck- 
age of the system during the period of addiction, owing to 
both drugs working their destroying results simultaneously, 
will be cured somewhat more speedily than when using 
opium alone. 

The former surgeon general of the United States army, 
Dr. Wm. H. Hammond, makes the statement that there 
is, strictly, no such thing as the cocaine habit. In the 
sense in which the doctor made the statement, this is 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 113 

probably true. It is exceedingly doubtful, at any rate 
medical investigation has not yet demonstrated, that co- 
caine produces structural change of the nervous system, its 
effect being so evanescent that it is largely expended in 
functional action upon the terminal nerves. There is, 
however, what is termed the cocaine tolerance, whereby 
the system learns to tolerate this deadly drug, thereby 
rendering it possible to take enormous doses by the habitue 
who accustoms himself to its action. 

Sometimes instances will be met, although they are 
comparatively rare, of use of morphia or laudanum by 
vaginal or rectal injections, by the use of rectal supposi- 
tories. Not infrequently cocaine .is taken through an 
atomizer by being inhaled into nostrils. But in whatever 
modes the habit may commence, the habitue who is ad- 
dicted to these habits for any great length of time usually 
settles down and ends his period of addiction by the use 
of the drugs either by the mouth or the hypodermic syr- 
inge. 

Some differences are met with in the specific effects of 
these drugs upon the different sexes. Opium, for instance, 
almost always lessens, if it does not entirely extinguish, 
the sexual passion in men. It is quite likely to produce 
the exactly opposite- effect in women. In men and women 
both, the use of opium or morphia is pretty sure to pro- 
duce chronic constipation, with its general accompaniment 
of haemorrhoids more or less severe. Its characteristic, 
too, is often to suppress or render irregular the menses and 
catamenia in women. Thus men are almost invariably 
easier subjects of treatment than women under fifty years 
of age, the menstrual flux returning with augmented inten- 
sity and volume during or immediately following the period 



114 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

of treatment. Children born during the period of opium 
addiction, in appearance, provided it is the father who is 
the opium habitue, oftentimes will exhibit little, if any, 
trace of the peculiar effects of the drug. The writer has 
seen sound and healthy children born in families of opium 
eaters when it was the father that was using the drug. 
When, however, the mother is the habitue, the child is 
very likely to exhibit the peculiar symptoms that follow in 
the wake of this deadty agent. 

The writer has seen children six months old exhibit all 
the peculiar and specific restlessness, general appearance, 
nervous unrest, of the adult opium eater. These morphin- 
ized miniatures of humanity take to the soothing syrup or 
the dose of paregoric which is given to them to quiet their 
uneasiness, as the duck sails into the embrace of the waters 
of the lake. 

One encouraging feature of the use of all these drugs 
is this: To a greater extent than with the reformed drunk- 
ard, more completely than with the redeemed inebriate, 
do all these symptoms of suffering, of terror and of dwarf- 
ing of human lives disappear when the cure is complete. 
Patients have crossed the threshold of the offices where the 
Bellinger cure was administered, with every form in which 
any of these drugs writes its imprint upon the human con- 
tenance of form, as visible as the sun at noon; they have 
left it, they have passed that threshold again within the 
period of a few weeks or two or three months, with every 
faculty of body and of mind in sound, healthy and normal 
action, so far as any and every test that the observation of 
friends, that the consciousness of self and selfhood, or that 
the keenest medical scrutiny could discover. The past in- 
deed is gone. The years that lie behind these darkened 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 115 

twilight lives cannot be given back. No treatment, how- 
ever perfect, can hold in its beneficent palm the gift of 
youth or the hours that, like the falling sands in the glass, 
have dropped into the embrace of the past. But with all 
the God-endowed nature of the men, with all and every 
faculty that the divine arm of creative power endowed 
them with as the soul was called into being by the uplifted 
hand of God, they are all regnant and again supreme, and 
with them, with them all, in harmonious, and to the pa- 
tients' consciousness, to the sufferers' vision, once more 
regnant and supreme in life, they go forth with the bow of 
promise that spans the arch of the years, with its pristine 
colors as bright and glorious. As all God's beneficence can 
endow them with renewed splendor of hope, they pass 
from the path of gloom that lies behind them into the way 
of promise that, with smiling beckoning, calls them to 
their redeemed and glorified future. 



BORDER LANDS. 



"What dreams may come." — Hamlet. 

"A barren detested vale, you see it is; here never shines the 
sun, here nothing breeds, save what would make such fearful and 
confused cries, as any mortal barely hearing it should straight 
fall mad." — Titus Andronicus. 

"Listen to the conclusion of the whole matter."— Ecclesi- 
astes. 



CHAPTER IX. 

BORDER LANDS. 

One leading aim of modern medical science, especially 
during the last quarter of a century, has been to endeavor 
to clear up the margins of unexplored remainders that 
lie about and around the horizons of disease, to get as 
far as possible from the imperativeness of empiricism 
and into the clear precision of a science that has a reason 
for its every action, of a treatment that knows and sees 
exactly what it attempts to accomplish. The old phy- 
sician, with his gig and his trunk, so useful in his day, with 
his case full of remedies which have done this and have 
done that and which are administered because of his accu- 
mulation of mere individual experience, the old familiar 
figure of our grandfathers' days, is passing into that of the 
alert modern scientist, who uses remedies as an astronomer 
uses the instruments that pierce the sky road of the stars, 
or the surgeon directs with accuracy his keen-edged tools. 
This is the modern physician, or w T hat he strives to be; 
this is the science exact, full of precision, that modern 
medicine is constantly attempting to become. 

What would be the natural course of this disease if 
left to itself ? Such was the sentence once uttered to the 
writer when beginning his medical experience, having just 
passed over the threshold that a man's feet walk, cov- 
ered with a diploma for a carpet. What would be the 
natural course of this disease if left to itself ? l ' Such, ' ' said 
a gray haired old practitioner, whose fame and honors lay 
strewn thickly round his path way, ' < was always the mental 



120 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

query that I endeavored to keep in the foreground of my 
mind when entering the path of my medical life." This 
is a question that, like many other questions, it is some- 
times easier to ask than to answer. What would be the 
natural history of this disease if left to itself ? Could this 
question be answered fully and exactly, treatment would 
of necessity become more and more exact, definite and re- 
sultful. 

On the border land of some diseases, or around its mar- 
gin, the veil of mystery has not yet been entirely lifted; 
the haze of more or less uncertainty still remains. The 
borderland of these dark and tragic diseases whose course 
we have endeavored in this volume to follow, unfortu- 
nately is never one of doubt. Whatever may be, if left 
undisturbed, the natural history of pneumonia, typhoid 
fever, peritonitis, or many of the ills that flesh is heir to, 
as regards these diseases whose consideration has filled the 
pages of this volume, their border land, while indeed one 
of twilight and of a twilight unlighted by benignant star, 
yet shows figures amid its gloom which are as definite as 
menacing. The border land of opium, of cocaine, of 
chloral, of hashish and of alcohol, is one over whose por- 
tal may be written " vestigia nulla retrorsum." Each has 
a fringe whose color, though inwrought with sable threads, 
is yet a curtain that has been lifted to a sufficient degree 
to enable us tp see with more or less distinctness what its 
gloom contains. These border lands, though all looking 
one way, and that way not toward the dawn, are yet border 
lands that have distinct and varying features. The auto- 
graph written upon the heart of the wasted years of the 
man whose life has been expended in the endeavor to fill 
the never filled hand of the opium demon, is shipwreck 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 121 

upon one reef; he whose life has been given to cocaine, 
chloral or hashish goes crashing upon another. 

The border land of opium is one that ordinarily it 
takes the devotee longer to reach than that of any of the 
others. They all seem to keep the word of promise to 
the ear and break it to the hope, yet the deception of 
opium is one that is usually longer masked than that of 
any of the others. Varying, indeed, as it does in differ- 
ent temperaments, yet it generally is a matter of years, 
often two or three decades, before its final destruction is 
accomplished. It produces its result with slower step 
than is the case with the others. The nerve changes that 
are produced by its constant use are so inwrought into the 
very structure of the entire system that their complete 
accomplishment is a matter of longer time. It is very 
seldom that the opium habitue finds his vital energies 
completely exhausted during the earlier years of his ad- 
diction. If the dose be held rigidly down, never mount- 
ing upward to the enormous quantities that some of its 
habitues have attained, the sufferer goes about the activi- 
ties of life with seemingly comparatively little disturbance 
from its normal mode of level and function. His system 
seems to live upon opium as that of the healthy man upon 
bread and meat. To a degree it takes their place. All 
the structural changes of the system are accomplished 
more slowly. There is less waste of tissue than is going 
on in the system of the normal man. But all this while 
it is constantly doing its work. The cable may be longer 
or shorter, but the habitue finds, sooner or later, that he 
has reached its entire length. Sometimes the vital ener- 
gies seem to falter suddenly, the powers to fail without 
much warning. Oftentimes the stomach, by either 



122 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

refusing food or performing the office of digestion with 
difficulty, hangs out the danger signal of a faltering sys- 
tem. Often it is a peculiar disturbance of sleep that gives 
warning of the coming end, though not in the weird dreams 
so forcefully and appallingly depicted by De Quincey. 
Could the testimony of the immense army of opium 
eaters be taken, it would be found, I suspect, that these 
come to comparatively few. Early in the morning, the 
victim, instead of waking to a sound and healthy recogni- 
tion of his waking life and his place in the world around 
him, passes from sleep into a seemingly epileptiform con- 
dition, accompanied often by more or less of convulsive 
action. He may suddenly lose consciousness while per- 
forming some accustomed task and regain it only after the 
lapse of hours; and when, by stimulation, the heart has 
been forced to its wonted action again, memory is often 
found to fail, familiar words pass from the victim's mental 
grasp, the power of consecutive thought is largely modi- 
fied, sometimes almost entirely disappears. In the midst 
of a sentence the sufferer forgets the subject about which 
he is talking, and with a look of bewilderment often comes 
to a pause. These are among the later symptoms that in- 
dicate that the stunted and starved nerve cell, the clogged 
and impeded nerve fiber can no longer carry on the men- 
tal energies of life. A pile of material is dumped along 
the path of the railroad along which the trains of thought 
run, bringing the whole machinery to a standstill. ' l The 
last scene of all that ends this strange, eventful history," 
is not, indeed, the second childhood with which life often 
ends, but a condition of bewildered thought, of reluctant 
energies that can no longer be sparred and goaded to their 
once so easily performed duty by the stimulation of the 
deadly poison. When this state is reached, the end is 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 123 

near. Some morning the watchful eyes that have for 
years turned their look of interrogation upon the sufferer 
as their earliest morning effort, find that the convulsive 
tremors, the distorted countenance, are peaceful and still. 
Opium has done its work. This subtle poison has bestowed 
its -last Judas kiss, and the opium votary has found the 
only rest which he has expected for years, the rest whose 
silence is unbroken, the dreamless sleep of the grave. 

The border land of cocaine is one which is reached 
much sooner. Its lurid flag is flashed before the vision of 
the cocaine habitue almost as soon as he enters his path of 
bondage. Indeed, scientists have seriously raised the 
question whether, strictly speaking, there is any cocaine 
habit at all. Its effects are so evanescent, its illusions so 
transitory, it seems to. enter and leave the human system 
w T ith such celerity, that apparently it finds hardly time to 
produce those more lasting and constant features to be 
met with along the course of opium. Cocaine is a direct 
nervous stimulant. It seems to play with the nerves as a 
football player does with the ball, kicking it into the air 
and watching its downward course to the earth again. The 
hallucinations which are one of the two or three most 
prominent features of this drug, are reached almost imme- 
diately. Its use, for a few weeks even, will push the 
habitue into a life in which the distinction between the 
real and the unreal becomes confused and dim almost from 
the start. To experience the effects of this drug with any 
degree of continuance, the votary must repeat his deadly 
dose at intervals of such short duration that the jangle and 
tangle of the mental powers are met almost immediately. 
They are produced with little pause. The sudden drop, 
so called, of the nervous system, which the cocaine votary 
learns so well and dreads so fearfully, is something that 



124 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

meets him almost upon the entrance into what he deems 
his lurid land of delight; hence, your cocaine habitue, if 
he permits this drug to continue, without abatement, its 
specific action, becomes a man whose doom rises before him 
almost before he has lost the echoes of his old normal 
life. The hallucinations sometimes follow him for hours, 
even when the agent that produced them is withheld 
from the system. There comes with this drug, and comes 
very rapidly also, a loss of power of co- ordination over the 
muscles; in other words, he cannot handle himself. He 
does not stagger in the way that the drunkard staggers, or 
reel like the inebriate through the streets. There is more 
of method in the cocaine madness. Each set of muscles 
seems to act independently of the other. The arms will 
be waving in different directions. One leg will seem to be 
endeavoring to move in opposition to the other one. It 
becomes a matter of great difficulty with him to insert the 
needle of his hypodermic syringe into the bottle of cocaine 
solution, because he cannot hold his muscles still long- 
enough to do it. An apprehensive tremor seems to per- 
vade not only his mental but his physical life as well. He 
will sit down in a chair and look all around him with 
anxious scrutiny as though he feared some unseen enemy 
were about to attack him from behind. He will hear voices 
whose tones are as real as those that strike upon the aural 
nerve when the actual sound waves are produced in the at- 
mosphere. The voice will be recognized. It will repeat 
one sentence over and over for hours. He seems to live 
in a waking dream, and yet the waking is sometimes con- 
fused with the dream and the dream with the waking. He 
sometimes feels that the unreal voices are the real ones, and 
the real ones are the unreal ones. Such terrific disturbance 
of the life centers, of course, cannot continue long. Hence, 



SHADOWS LIFTED. 125 

insanity is not only the certain, but speedy end of the cocaine 
victim. One or two years is usually sufficient to land him 
in the insane asylum, and if, by exceptional strength of 
constitution, of vigor of brain, he eludes the issue, it is 
only pushing it off a little longer. Insanity of a strange 
and fearful type is always held fast in the grip of the co- 
caine demon, and he presents it as his last fateful gift to 
his victim. No more dreadful sight ean be imagined than 
the last days and weeks of the cocaine sufferer's border land. 
It is written ail over with fateful characters, every syllable 
of which should contain admonitions of warning. The co- 
caine victims are increasing so rapidly that it will be a 
mercy if this picture of the border land of this hateful 
drug shall be seen by them before they pass the threshold 
of its use. 

One who has ever looked upon the countenance of the 
chloral habitue will need little amplification of the sug- 
gestions of that one lesson to place before his mental vis- 
ion the border land of this deceitful drug. The expression 
4 'steal away a man's brains," though applicable to many 
agents that man has found to produce the result of intox- 
ication, is so peculiarly applicable to none of them as to 
the hydrate of chloral. It never makes a fiend of a 
man. It will not, on the other hand, allow him, as does 
opium, to deceive himself for years that he is pursuing 
with fair success, and with, perhaps, little apparent dis- 
turbance, the normal activities of life. It begins its action 
speedily, nor does it delay its endlong. Imbecility is the 
motto of chloral. The evaporating, the obliterating, the 
utter quenching of those virile energies and stalwart men- 
tal faculties which most fully make up the photograph 
of strong and helpful and masterful manhood, the 
chloral will gently, quietly, but always successfully steal 



126 SHADO WS LIFTED. 

away from a man, one by one, so that at the border land 
which marks the end of its power and effect there is little 
left in him worth stealing. The man has become a bab- 
bling, chattering, meaningless imbecile, his mental and 
physical stature pitifully broken into fragments. Perhaps 
— and the perhaps is probably a strong hypothesis — the 
chloral habitue does not himself suffer the agonies of the 
opium fiend or the cocaine maniac, but as a pitiful, fear- 
ful object to look upon, the man who has entered the 
border land of chloral is one whose power of pathos and 
all that moves the pity of a human heart it would be found 
difficult to equal in searching through the entire field of 
shipwrecked human lives. 

The border land of hashish more nearly resembles that 
of cocaine than that of any other single drug, and yet it 
has its points of dissimilarity. When taken into the sys- 
tem, it often, indeed usually, remains latent for a longer 
or shorter period before exerting its full power, so its 
destructive products are not so quickly seen. It acts upon 
the faculties of the human intellect along something the 
same line as cocaine, but it holds these faculties in thral- 
dom longer. Your hashish eater becomes a man in whose 
mental vision the line between the normal and the abnor- 
mal, while quite as great as in the cocaine habitue, yet 
has greater distinctness. Physically the hashish votary 
soon becomes a wreck; mentally he holds his balance, 
while not under the influence of the drug, longer than does 
the victim of cocaine. Among the latter features which 
are upon the threshold of this borderland there are paraly- 
sis, the total effacement of all power over the nerves of 
motion, a complete inability of the will to rouse any re- 
sponse from their jaded filaments. Madness of a more 
continuous kind than that of the cocaine habitue is the lot 



SHADOWS LIFTED. ' 121 

of the hashish eater. Its strokes are stronger as to the 
effect of each single one than those of cocaine. Cocaine 
is a stiletto that stabs a man with oft repeated touch; 
hashish is a Damascus blade which, while it does not smite 
so often, cuts to the very life when its blows are given. 

The border land of alcohol is one whose labyrinths 
have been trodden by so many feet, Avhose paths have been 
so much more thoroughly explored than the border land 
of most of the drugs with which we have been dealing in 
this volume, that there needs to be said less than that re- 
lasting to any of them. The end of the drunkard is some- 
thing that has been depicted by the drama, by poetry, by 
prose, and that has been written into the very texture of 
the souls of its victims and those whose lives were by ties 
of kinship and of affection most intimately interblended 
with them. Delirium tremens is something that is no 
longer a mystery, either in the way of experience or of the 
depicting of its experiences to any whose observation of 
human life has extended beyond the circle of their own 
selves. How the drunkard lives and how the drunkard 
dies are both pictures that are too well known, too fre- 
quently seen, to need extended notice here. The border 
land of intemperance is a border land where despair and 
suffering reign supreme. Into its shadow land go thou- 
sands of feet who never meant, who never expected to 
tread its fateful paths. To shun the border land, the 
voice of common sense, as well as the admonitions of 
Holy Writ, tells us, Refuse to enter the paths which, 
lined with primrose and heavy with perfume in their ini- 
tiatory steps, are almost certain to lead there. 

With this vision of these fateful border lands, we close 
the words of this volume. Happily they need no longer 
be border lands whose hither gates are shut and closed upon 



\ 



128 SHADOWS LIFTED. 

every human life that enters therein. This happily need 
be no longer. The sufferer whose paths have led him close 
to the threshold of them all, or who has indeed crossed the 
portal of any of them, now can look backward and find a 
hand extended in mercy as well as invitation, beckoning him 
back to the brightness and sweetness of life. While, for 
the sufferer who has entered their pathway and who goes 
on with face turned toward their deepening shadows, they 
all end in the blackness of the grave and the mystery land 
of death, yet with the voice that calls him backward sound- 
ing its promise of beneficence in his long dulled ears, with 
that voice reaching him and that hand seen in the spaces 
that lie behind him, with that hand outstretching to him to 
aid him in his backward path toward life, no hopeless vic- 
tim of any one of these forms of bondage need longer take 
counsel with despair or refuse to listen to the suggesting* 
of hope. 

Speaking not as an enthusiast, where the wish is 
father to the thought, but uttering only the sober words 
of experience, the writer of this volume utters this last 
word to those whose feet have long trodden these down- 
ward slopes: There is no one pathway of any oi 
border lands where the sufferer cannot easily, speed: 
certainly retrace his footsteps; no one of them, wh( 
energies of life have not been almost entirely exhau 
from which the beneficent hand of the Bellinger cu 
all forms of drug disease shall not and cannot lea 
backward toward the safe and happy highways of 1 
helpfulness and usefulness, and give him back to hi 
to his family, to his fellow-men and to his God, i 
whose interior energies of life and whose every facu 
which his manhood rested shall be regenerated, red* 
and permanently restored. 






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